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Oxford Sausage
M. A. Sadler.
Take one pound of young pork, fat and lean, without skin or gristle, one pound of lean veal, one pound of beef suet chopped very fine together. Put in half a pound of bread crumbs, six sage leaves, a teaspoon of pepper and two of salt, some thyme, marjoram and savoury shred fine. Mix well together.
This is a skinless sausage meat, not a linked sausage — the mixture is meant to be rolled into small cylinders or patties and fried. A few things need translating before it works on a modern stove.
- It is uncooked as givenThe recipe stops at "mix well together" and gives no cooking method; the mixture would be shaped and fried until browned through. Cook patties to an internal 160F.
- Beef suetA full pound of hard beef suet is a lot of firm fat by modern taste and will set waxy when the sausage cools. Butchers still sell fresh suet on request; shredded packaged suet is usually treated with flour and behaves differently. Some cooks substitute pork back fat for a softer result.
- Six sage leavesFresh leaves, chopped, not dried — roughly a tablespoon chopped, or about a teaspoon of dried rubbed sage. Sage is characteristic of English sausage seasoning, and this is a restrained amount for two pounds of meat and a pound of suet.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from a stale loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Half a pound is generous and gives the light, almost stuffing-like texture that distinguishes this style from a coarse butcher's sausage.
- Chopping"Chopped very fine together" means the three meats and the suet are worked into one mass. A food processor in short pulses does it, but stop while the mixture still has texture — over-processing gives a pasty result.
- Test the seasoningTwo teaspoons of salt to three pounds of meat and suet plus half a pound of crumbs is on the low side by modern sausage practice. Fry a small piece, taste, and adjust before shaping the rest.
- YieldAbout three and a half pounds of sausage meat, enough for twelve to sixteen patties. It freezes well raw.
Oxford sausage is one of the named regional English sausages, generally traced to the eighteenth century and distinguished by the use of veal alongside pork, a heavy hand with sage and other herbs, and the absence of a casing — it was sold and cooked as loose meat, rolled by hand. Recipes of this kind circulated in the eighteenth century under names such as "Oxford" and "Oxford Kate's" sausage across several books. The three-way split of pork, veal and suet reflects a period when beef suet was the household's standing fat, kept by the pound for puddings and pastry as much as for sausage. That this one carries a contributor's name, M. A. Sadler, is typical of the genre: subscription cookbooks were assembled from contributors' own recipes, each dish credited to the woman who sent it in.