Sausages, Veal
INGREDIENTS.- Equal quantities of fat bacon and lean veal; to every lb. of meat, allow 1 teaspoonful of minced sage, salt and pepper to taste.
Chop the meat and bacon finely, and to every pound allow the above proportion of SCOTCH OAT CAKE.
A plain forcemeat-style sausage of veal and bacon, seasoned with nothing but sage, salt and pepper. Note first that the text as printed here breaks off mid-sentence and runs into the heading of the following entry, so the binding, shaping and cooking directions are missing.
- The truncated line"...and to every pound allow the above proportion of SCOTCH OAT CAKE" is a printing collision: Scotch Oat Cake appears to be the heading of the following entry, run on into this one. What the missing words said cannot be recovered, but nothing oat-based belongs in the mixture.
- What is missingThe binding, shaping and cooking directions are lost. You will have to supply them yourself: a beaten egg to bind, shaping into small rolls or filling skins, and gentle frying in butter or dripping.
- The half-and-half ratioEqual weights of fat bacon and lean veal is the hinge. Veal is very lean and dries to sawdust on its own; the bacon supplies all the fat, so do not trim it down or substitute lean back bacon.
- Bacon then and nowPeriod fat bacon was a fatty side or streaky cut, cured by dry-salting or in brine, and not comparable to modern water-injected rashers. Use unsmoked streaky or a piece of pork belly with a little extra salt if you want the intended texture; if using modern cured bacon, be sparing with added salt.
- SageA teaspoon of minced fresh sage per pound of meat. Dried sage is considerably stronger; a third of that quantity is closer, and it should be rubbed rather than powdered.
- Chopping"Chop finely" meant knife-work on a board, which leaves a coarse, open texture. A food processor will emulsify the fat if you overwork it — better use a coarse plate on a mincer and keep everything cold.
- CookingVeal and pork sausages need to reach 71C/160F throughout, which for small skinless rolls means gentle frying for 12-15 minutes, turning. High heat splits them and squeezes the bacon fat out.
- YieldA pound of veal with a pound of bacon gives about 2 lb of mixture, or twelve to sixteen small sausages — four to six servings.
Veal sausages sit in a long English tradition of pale, delicately seasoned sausage meat distinct from the peppery pork sausages of the butcher's shop they belong with forcemeat balls, quenelles and the veal stuffings served with roast poultry. Sage is a defining seasoning in English sausage recipes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often alongside mace and nutmeg. The absolute reliance on fat bacon reflects a kitchen reality that has not changed: British veal, from young milk-fed animals, carries almost no intramuscular fat and must be lubricated by something else. Beeton's All About Cookery, published in the decades after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865, was a compressed alphabetical reworking of the vast original Book of Household Management, written in a terse ingredient-list style; the occasional collision of one entry with the next, as here, may be no more than a typesetting or transcription artifact.