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Fancy or Book Sausage Roll
Take a piece of best puff paste, roll it out to an eighth of an inch in thickness; then cut it up in squares four inches square, lay them out on board; then have the sausage meat ready, break it off in pieces the size of a small egg; roll them out three inches long and place one piece in the middle of each square of pastry, Now wet the edge of the pastry with water, then bring the part furthest from you over on to the part nearest to you, taking care to let it be back from the front at least one-fourth of an inch ; now wash these with egg, taking care not to allow the egg to run down over the sides of the pastry. Next give a few shallow cuts with a sharp knife; then cut a leaf of pastry, place it in the center (do not wash it), and bake them a nice brown. If these are made well the edges will rise up and the roll will look like a book.
A Victorian sausage roll dressed up to look like a closed book, with the cut edges standing in for pages. The recipe assumes you know how puff paste behaves; the points below fill in what it leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: keep everything coldPuff paste only rises into distinct "pages" if the butter layers are still firm going into the oven. Chill the assembled rolls 20-30 minutes before baking, and bake straight from the refrigerator.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Puff pastry needs a hot oven to lift: start at 425F for about 15 minutes, then drop to 375F for another 15-20 to cook the meat through without scorching the pastry.
- Sausage meat means bulk porkIn the 1880s this generally meant plain seasoned ground pork rather than a filled casing. Use bulk breakfast or Italian sausage, or ground pork seasoned with salt, pepper, sage and a little mace. Squeeze links from their casings if that is all you can get.
- Cook the filling throughA three-inch rope of raw pork the size of a small egg needs to reach 160F at the center. Check one with an instant-read thermometer rather than trusting the color of the pastry, which browns well before the meat is done.
- "Wash" means brushBeaten whole egg, or a yolk loosened with a spoonful of water. The warning about letting it run down the sides is real: egg on a cut edge glues the layers together and that side will not rise.
- The shallow cutsThree or four parallel scores across the top edge, through the top layer only. These open in the oven and read as the pages of a book. Cutting all the way through lets the fat run out.
- The unwashed leafThe recipe says only '(do not wash it)', which presumably keeps the leaf pale against the glazed top.
- Yield and servingA pound of puff paste and a pound of sausage give roughly ten four-inch squares. Serve warm, within an hour or two of baking; reheat at 375F rather than in a microwave, which softens the layers.
Sausage wrapped in pastry is old and widespread, but the small hand-held sausage roll as we know it is generally traced to nineteenth-century Britain, where cheap puff paste and bulk pork sausage met in bakers' shops. What makes this version worth reading is the conceit: the baker exploits the fact that scored puff pastry splays open in the heat, so the finished roll mimics the fanned pages and tooled cover of a bound book, with a pastry leaf laid on as decoration. The Dixie Cook Book carried a good deal of this kind of professional confectioner's showmanship alongside its plainer Southern household fare — a sign that novelty shapes were a selling point at a time when a middle-class supper was expected to look composed as well as taste right.