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Sausage Patties
Half a pound of sausage meat of any kind that you like. Make some rounds of paste, lay the meat on half of each round and fold over. Steam for quarter of an hour, or stew in plenty of gravy.
A wartime scrap-of-pastry dish, written for cooks who already knew what "paste" meant and needed no further instruction. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- "Paste" means pastryIn an English-language book of this date, paste is plain shortcrust or a suet crust, not a paste in the modern sense. The recipe gives no quantity or size, so judge it by eye: roughly half a pound of pastry-weight, rolled thin and cut into rounds large enough to fold over a spoonful of the meat.
- YieldHalf a pound of sausage meat makes a handful of small turnovers, depending on the size of round you cut; enough for two or three people with vegetables. It scales up directly.
- Seal them properlyDamp the edge, fold over and crimp firmly. Steam or gravy will find any gap, and a patty that opens in the pot loses its filling into the liquid.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockFifteen minutes of steaming will set the pastry but may not bring raw sausage meat in the centre to a safe 160F/71C, particularly if the patties are thick. Check one with a probe thermometer and give them another five to ten minutes if needed.
- Steaming versus stewingSteamed, the crust stays pale and soft, like a small suet dumpling. Stewed in gravy, it swells and thickens the liquid slightly, which is the more useful version if you want a one-pot supper.
- Suet crust suits the methodShortcrust can turn claggy under steam. A suet crust holds up better to both steaming and simmering in gravy, though the recipe does not say which paste is meant.
- The gravyThe recipe says only "plenty of gravy"; in practice enough to half-submerge the patties in a lidded pan works well. Any well-flavoured brown stock will do; keep it at a bare simmer so the crust does not break up.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it was sold in aid of relief funds. That origin explains the register of a recipe like this one: half a pound of sausage meat of any kind, a few rounds of pastry, and a choice between the steamer and the stewpot depending on what fuel and equipment the household had. The instruction to use sausage meat "of any kind that you like" is the voice of a cook writing for people who could not be choosy, and the book's charm is precisely this compression -- recipes set down without the leisure for weights, temperatures or explanation.