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Sausage-Meat, Fried
INGREDIENTS. To every 1 lb. of lean pork, add lb. of fat bacon , oz. of salt, 1 saltspoonful of pepper, 1/4 teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, 1 teaspoonful of minced parsley. AVERAGE COST, 9d. per lb.
Remove from the pork all skin, gristle and bone, and chop it finely with the bacon; add the remaining ingredients and carefully mix all together. Pound it well in a mortar, make it into convenienent-sized cakes, flour these and fry them a nice brown for about 10 minutes. This is a very simple method of making sausage-meat, and on trial will prove very good, its great recommendation be being that it is so easily made.
TIME.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
Sausage-Meat Stuffing (for Turkeys). INGREDIENTS for stuffing for small turkey.-6 oz. of lean pork, 6 oz. of fat pork, both weighed after being chopped (beef-suet may be substituted for the latter), 2 oz. of bread-crumbs, 1 small tablespoonful of minced sage, 1 blade of pounded mace, salt and pepper to taste, 1 egg. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Chop the meat and fat very finely, mix with them the other ingredients, taking care that the whole is thoroughly incorporated. Moisten with the egg, and the stuffing will be ready for use. Equal quantities of this stuffing and forcemeat will be found to answer very well, as the herbs, lemon-peel, &c., in the latter, impart a very delicious flavour to the sausagemeat.
A plain fresh sausage mixture, bound by nothing but pounding and fried as flat cakes rather than filled into casings. It works, but the seasoning quantities in this printing need a cook's judgement.
- Missing fractionsThe bacon and salt quantities have lost their fractions in this printing. Standard proportions for a fresh pork sausage of this type are about 1/2 lb fat bacon and 1/2 oz (roughly 2 1/2 teaspoons) salt per pound of lean pork; taste-test a small fried patty before committing the batch.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so the pepper here is a quarter-teaspoon per pound. That is mild by modern taste.
- Fat ratio is the pointRoughly one part fat to two parts lean is what keeps the cakes from frying dry. Fat bacon means the fat of a cured flitch rather than a modern thin rasher; a heavily smoked bacon will dominate the nutmeg and parsley.
- Chopping and poundingHand-chopping followed by mortar work gives a smoother, tighter paste than a coarse grind. A food processor pulsed on very cold meat achieves the same in seconds; overrun it warm and the fat smears and the cakes turn greasy.
- Ten minutes is rightCakes about 1/2 inch thick need roughly five minutes a side over moderate heat to reach 71C/160F through the centre. Fresh pork sausage should be cooked through, not pink.
- YieldOne pound of pork plus the bacon makes about eight cakes, enough for four as a breakfast dish.
- On the stuffing that followsThat recipe is uncooked and is meant to go inside a bird, where it must reach 74C/165F. Stuff loosely and check the centre of the stuffing with a thermometer, not the bird alone.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single piece of the dried aril, equivalent to roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace once pounded.
Sausage-meat sold loose, rather than in skins, was a staple of the British butcher's counter well into the twentieth century, and Mrs Beeton's household audience would have bought it by the pound for stuffings, patties and pies as readily as for breakfast. The September-to-March season given here is the old pig-killing calendar: before mechanical refrigeration, fresh pork was a cold-weather meat, and the phrase "there is no R in the month" was applied to pork as often as to oysters. Nutmeg and mace in pork forcemeat are a survival of much older English cookery, where the sweet spices were standard in meat dishes rather than confined to puddings, and the ninepence-a-pound costing that Beeton attaches to nearly every recipe is often said to have been a novel editorial feature when the work first appeared, aimed at mistresses managing a household budget rather than at cooks.