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| Sausages boil and fried served with 17th century available buttered spinach and turnips with nutmeg. |
As the saying goes, we got there in the end. This week's entry details my attempt to use some pork shoulder I had to make a couple different sausages. Making sausages seemed to be one of the main uses of that specific meat in the seventeenth century, if the extant cookery books provide an accurate picture. Robert May’s The Accomplist Cook (1660) is a pretty encyclopedic source for most things culinary at the time and this proved true in finding guidelines for this endeavour. I also found a different recipe from an earlier anonymous book called The Good Hous-wives Treasurie (1588).
Probably pretty foolishly, I decided to try and make these sausages by hand, both in the dicing and the stuffing. I did to try to come close to period methods and tools. It is a very long and tedious process, exacerbated by the fact that despite me buying modern collagen ones, I broke my casings a lot. Whether you want to follow them or not, I will give you a couple recipes based on my process. I present those first, then explain my adaptions of the historical original recipes and finally give a few historical insights on Bolonia sausages that I found in my reading.
Recipes
“Sausages of Pork” (based on a recipe from The Accomplist Cook)
Ingredients:
- 600g boneless pork shoulder, minced as fine as you can
- 40g beef suet, shredded
- 6g fresh sage leaves, minced
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp pepper, coarsely ground
- ½ tsp cloves, ground
- ¼ tsp mace, ground
- Sausage casings for stuffing
- Butter for frying
Instructions:
Take all ingredients save the casings and butter. Mix together well in a large bowl.
Refrigerate the bowl and take out a small amount of the meat mixture to work with, as you will be hand-stuffing your sausage for a while.
Prepare your casings, if needed, as per instructions. Collagen ones say they do not need preparation, but I found that massaging them a bit with greasy hands at the opening helps loosen it up a bit. Cut off the amount you are going to use; tie one end off and open the other.
Take a decent-sized spoon with a short wide handle – a large measuring spoon will work or an Asian soup spoon. Stick the handle end into the open end of your casing, leaving the spoon part sticking out.
Grab the handle (and the casing opening) with one hand. With the other, place a small amount of sausage meat in the spoon and carefully push it into the casing opening.
Push that first bit of meat all the way down to the tied-off end of your casing. This will prepare the casing for the rest.
Repeat, again and again and again etc. until you fill your sausage.
Push out as much air as you can.
Tie off the other end. If you didn’t leave yourself enough casing, twist what you have and tie a knot around it with kitchen string.
Poke your completed sausage with a sharp knife or a few times with a pin.
Boil very gently for about 15 minutes or fry in butter on medium heat until golden on all side – about 10 minutes.
Serve.
“To Make Sausages” (based on a recipe from The Good Hous-wives Treasurie)
Ingredients:
- 400g pork shoulder, minced
- 50g beef suet, shredded
- 2 egg yolks
- 100g bread crumbs
- 2 Tbsp whipping cream
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp pepper, coarsely ground
- Flour for dusting
- Butter for frying
Instructions:
Mix all ingredients save the flour and butter in a large bowl.
Form into patties or sausage shapes.
Dust shapes with flour.
Fry in butter on medium heat turning until all sides are deeply coloured – about 10 minutes.
Serve.
Notes on Adaption and Historical Texts
I will say again: mincing pork shoulder and stuffing casings by hand is a whole lot of work but I did learn a skill that has no practical modern use. Also, despite all your efforts and blisters on your knife hand, you will not get uniform minced pork. The result, however, is really very tasty, certainly different from your regular ground sausage. More on the specific tastes after each version.
Robert May gives instructions for Bolonia Sausages (which I will touch on a bit later), four other sausage variations and “Links.”
The ingredient list for my first attempt comes from one of the pork variations from above. The writer says to roll those into sausage shapes and fry them. In another he says: “fill them into porkets guts, or hogs, or sheeps guts, or no guts.” For the experience, apparently, I decided to stuff most of this sausage meat into casings. In other variants, he says “if in guts, boil them” and “if without guts, fry them.” I tried both and, probably not surprisingly, the texture of the fried ones were better but the boiled ones were not bad and had a great flavour.
May gives no quantities, so again I went with experience, measuring as I went. Modern pork shoulder as opposed to the leg - which some recipes specify - is quite fatty, so I kept the amount of suet low in this one.
These sausages are very sage-forward with the ingredient ratios I used. I really like the herb and, as many period recipes already figured out, it goes great with pork. That said, if sage is not your thing, you will probably want to cut back on it a little. The cloves and mace are nice background or secondary flavours. The meatiness that suet provides other dishes is not needed here and it is probably lost overall.
Hannah Woolley also provides a similar sage pork sausage recipe in The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight (1675). You can compare it below.
As I could not find a digital image of The Good Hous-wives Treasurie (1588), I include the transcription of the second recipe I adapted, with some of the spelling modernised.
“How to make Sausages.
Take the Fillets of a Hog, and half as much of the suet of the Hog: and chop them both very small, then take grated bread, two or three yolks of eggs a spoonful of gross pepper, as much salt, temper them with a little cream, and so put them into the skin and broil them on a gridiron.”
Again, the pork shoulder I was using had a lot of fat, so I did not use near “half as much” suet as meat. I also had beef suet already, so I used it. For the same reason, I used fine bread crumbs rather than grated bread. This along with the egg yolks and cream made the mix quite solid. I did try to stuff casings with it as the recipes says but it was impossible to push it through without breaking them. So, I cheated and used May’s advice and just made patties and formed some sausages. I got the flour from another recipe for sausages without casings and it helped to keep the sausages together in the pan. I also fried not broiled them.
These sausage attempts came out extremely crispy and nice, though not really like sausages. I missed the flavours of the sage and spices in my other version but seasoned, almost crunchy pork is not bad at all.
A Final Word on Bolonia Sausages (or maybe a project for another day)
I am a big fan of mortadella, sliced super thin. It is the superior predecessor of the bologna or baloney known to North American kids. In Italy, mortadella was probably around in the fourteenth century and by the seventeenth, lots of English cookery texts mention Bolonia sausages. Robert May gives them a prominent place in his section on the meaty preparations.
Like today’s mortadella, he calls for small chunks of lard in the minced meat. Another text from 1699 gives instructions “To make Sausages equal to those brought from Bolonia” and claims at the end “they will equal those so much boasted of from Italy.” Bolonia sausage is something that I would like to try but there are some barriers as seen in May's recipe above.
I will need to find “beefer guts” as well as “peter-salt” (I assume saltpeter) or the so far unknown “Spanish salt.” It also requires curing and/or smoking time and locations and thus remains a medium-term dream.
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