Home › Vegetarian Dishes › Mock Sausage
Mock Sausage
1 cup dried Lima beans or
3 eggs
3 cups cooked beans of
2 tablespoons butter any kind
½ teaspoon sage
⅔ cup bread-crums
Salt and pepper
Pick over and wash beans, cover with water and let soak overnight. Drain, cook in boiling salted water until tender, then force through a strainer. Add remaining ingredients, shape into form of sausages, roll in crums, egg, and crums again. Sauté until brown. Serve with tomato sauce.
This recipe makes six to eight sausages, three inches long and three-fourths of an inch thick. It should be accompanied by some milk, egg or cheese dish.
The ingredient list has been mangled by the book's two-column layout; read it as 1 cup dried Lima beans (or 3 cups cooked beans of any kind), 3 eggs, 2 tablespoons butter, ½ teaspoon sage, ⅔ cup bread-crumbs, salt and pepper. Everything else is straightforward once the mixture is stiff enough to hold a shape.
- The hinge: a dry puréeBeans forced through a strainer while wet will slump the moment they hit the fat. Drain them thoroughly and, if the mash still looks loose, return it to the dry pan over low heat for a few minutes to drive off moisture before adding the eggs and crumbs.
- How many eggs go whereThe recipe lists three eggs and then calls for egg again in the crumb coating without saying how they divide. Reserve one of the three, beaten with a spoonful of water, for the crumb-egg-crumb coating, or beat an extra egg for it if the mixture seems dry with only two.
- Forcing through a strainerA food mill or the coarse disc of a ricer does this in a fraction of the time. A food processor works but tends toward a gluey paste; pulse rather than run it.
- Chill before fryingThe original skips this, but half an hour in the refrigerator after shaping firms the sausages and makes the double crumbing stick. It is the difference between six sausages and a pan of fried bean mash.
- Sauté means shallow fatUse a few tablespoons of butter or oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat and turn the sausages to brown all sides, six to eight minutes total. Hot enough to set the crust immediately, not hot enough to scorch the crumbs before the inside warms through.
- SageHalf a teaspoon of dried sage is doing all the work of standing in for pork sausage. Ground sage is stronger than rubbed; if using ground, start with a scant ¼ teaspoon, then fry a test spoonful of the mixture and taste that before seasoning the rest.
- Yield and the note about milk or cheeseSix to eight small sausages serve two or three. The instruction to accompany them with a milk, egg or cheese dish reads as period advice about rounding out a meatless dish with dairy protein; a modern cook need not treat it as obligatory.
"Mock" dishes fill a whole genre of American cookery around 1900: mock turtle, mock duck, mock oysters, mock cherry pie. Some were thrift measures, but a bean sausage of this kind belongs to a different impulse — the wave of meatless cookery promoted from the 1890s onward by health reformers, sanitarium kitchens and domestic-science instructors, who taught that legumes could carry the nitrogenous matter (what we would call protein) that meat supplied. Butterick, a pattern company, issued cookery and household instruction alongside its patterns, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper following that advice, which may be why the recipe ends by prescribing a milk, egg or cheese dish alongside. The shaping and double crumbing matter as much as the taste: the point of a mock sausage was that it looked like a sausage on the plate, sauce and all.