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Mock Pork Sausage
1 Pound Hamburger Steak 1 Tablespoon Sage 11/2 Teaspoons Savory 11/2 Teaspoons Thyme 2 Cupfuls Cold Cooked Oats 21/2 Teaspoons Salt 1/2 Teaspoon Pepper 1 Beaten Egg 2 Tablespoons Cooking Oil Mix all thoroughly, form into flat cakes, dip in flour and sauté until well done and brown. This quantity will make sixteen cakes about two inches in diameter and half an inch thick.
A thrift recipe that stretches a pound of beef into sixteen patties with cooked oatmeal, seasoned to taste like breakfast sausage. Straightforward to make, with two things worth knowing before you start.
- Cold cooked oats, not rawThis means leftover porridge — rolled or steel-cut oats already cooked in water and thoroughly chilled. Two cupfuls of cooked oats is roughly what a cup of dry rolled oats yields (rather less if steel-cut). Raw oats bind less reliably and can stay gritty.
- Hamburger steakSimply ground beef. In period usage the term generally meant beef ground for the purpose, often on the lean side; a modern 80/20 chuck works well here and keeps the cakes from drying, since the oats absorb a good deal of moisture.
- The sage is the whole pointA tablespoon of dried sage per pound of meat is what makes the mixture read as sausage rather than as a beef patty. If your sage has been in the cupboard a year, replace it — stale sage tastes of dust, and the thyme, savory and pepper alongside it will not carry the sausage flavour on their own.
- SaltTwo and a half teaspoons is calibrated for the oats as well as the meat, so it is not as heavy as it looks against a single pound of beef. If using fine table salt rather than a coarse salt, start with two teaspoons and fry a test cake.
- Chill before shapingThe mixture is wet. An hour in the refrigerator firms it enough to shape cleanly and helps the flour coating stay put in the pan.
- CookingTwo tablespoons of oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat, about 4 minutes a side for cakes half an inch thick. "Well done" here is correct practice for ground beef — 160°F throughout.
- YieldSixteen small cakes, enough for four to six at breakfast. They reheat well and freeze raw between sheets of paper.
Mock dishes run all through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks — mock turtle soup, mock cherry pie, mock duck — and they fall into two camps: the ones that imitate an expensive thing with a cheap one, and the ones that imitate a flavor without the meat behind it. This is the first kind. Pork sausage was seasonal, tied to the winter hog-killing, while beef trimmings and yesterday's oatmeal were not, and sage, thyme and savory are precisely the herbs that carried breakfast sausage in that period, so the substitution reads convincingly. Oatmeal as a meat extender is a long-standing habit in Scottish and northern English cooking, where it also binds white puddings; American household books absorbed the technique as plain economy.