The Decadent Cookbook (25 page)

Now that the mountain ranges of Eastern Europe have been reopened to the huntsman, we can hope that black bear sausages will regain their rightful place on the breakfast chariots of the West. The best sausage bears are males 12-18 months old, shot in the autumn. Be warned, though: bears are dangerous, rare and unpredictable. A German businessman on a recent hunting trip to Hungary fell into the hands of a wily ‘peasant guide’ who, knowing there were no bears left in the wild, bought an old performing bear from a circus and released it into the woods a few hundred metres from his client. The bear found the woods an unfamiliar and frightening place, and made for the more welcoming surroundings of a village, where it found at last something it recognized: a bicycle. Climbing on, it rode happily round the lanes for a while, until it met the businessman, who got such a shock that he had a heart-attack and died. The story might have ended happily there, with the bear enjoying a bottle of beer and a plate of grilled businessman sausages in the local pub, if the shotgun hadn’t gone off in the confusion, causing the bear a fatal heart attack of its own…

So, with the moral of this sobering tale in mind, and taking all appropriate precautions, here are black bear sausages:

1¾
LB
LEAN
BEAR
MEAT,
AND

1¼
LB
SHOULDER
OF
PORK,
BOTH
MINCED

2
ONIONS
AND
2
CLOVES
OF
GARLIC,
FINELY
CHOPPED

BLACK
AND
WHITE
PEPPER

PAPRIKA

A
FEW
CRUSHED
JUNIPER
BERRIES

AS
A
PRESERVATIVE
: 1
OZ
SALT
, ½
OZ
BROWN
SUGAR
, ¼
OZ

SALTPETRE

HOG
CASINGS
(1½
INCHES
WIDE
, 12
INCHES
LONG
)

Mix all the ingredients, stuff into casings, and hang in cool smoke for 12 hours.

Thuringia in eastern Germany has a high reputation for its sausages, so if you can get them, do. Otherwise this old family recipe can be made with any good frying sausage.

S
AUSAGES

R
ICE
PUDDING

Fry the sausages, and serve on a bed of rice pudding. Jam makes an optional garnish.

‘The kromeski or Polish croquette,’ says
Kettner’s Book of the Table
, ‘is made in the usual way with an addition. It is any croquette formed into a little roll and wrapped round with a thin slice of the udder of veal, or failing that with thin bacon. The veal udder (which is always best) or the bacon is boiled beforehand, is then sliced and wrapt round the croquette, which is finally dipped into batter and consigned to the frying-pan, from which it should come out crisp. This is the most seductive of all the forms of croquette.’

This is really a dessert kebab rather than a sausage, but the shape is right and the idea ingenious.

Peel and cut apples into ½ inch thick circles, 1 inch across, and soak in rum. Cut some cold Christmas pudding into 1 inch discs. Thread Christmas pudding and apples alternately on skewers, packing them tight to form a sausage shape. Dip in egg and breadcrumbs, fry in very hot fat, and serve with brandy butter.

A fifteenth century English recipe which speaks for itself:

‘Take the blood of him and the grease of himself, and oatmeal and salt and pepper and ginger, mix these well together and then put this into the gut of the porpoise and then let it seethe easily, and not too hard, a good while; and then take him out and broil him a little and then serve forth.’

Probably the most offensive sausage in the world.

2
LB
STREAKY,
PICKLED
FORELEG
OF
PORK

3
LB
PIG’S
HEAD
MEAT

1
LB
SALTED
PIG’S
TONGUE

2
LB
SALTED
PORK
RIND
AND
CALVES’
FEET

STRONG
STOCK,
PEPPER,
SALT,
NUTMEG

CORIANDER
AND
SHALLOTS

Cut the pickled foreleg, the head meat and the tongue into pieces the size of beechnuts. Then add the rind and calves’ feet, mix well and chop down to size of peas. Work the mixture together, binding with strong stock. Add the seasoning and fill loosely into a pig’s stomach. Simmer for one and a half to two hours.

‘Some brave, big slices of taties, turmuts and onions, all mixed together with pepper and salt and put in a pie dish with a tidy piece of flesh from Mawther’s Bussa. Put ‘em to cooky, and have some skins (same as they do have for Hogs Puddens) and mix flour, suet, oatmeal and figs and an egg, mixen like batter, lookey see! and shove batter into the skins, twist’en round the flesh and cook till light brown. Same to us down-along as Haggis be to they up-along.’

G
LOSSARY

turmuts = turnips

flesh from Mawther’s Bussa = pork, lightly salted

figs = raisins

Charles Lamb on the sucking-pig:

“Of all the delicacies in the whole
mundus edibilis,”
he says, “I will maintain it to be the most delicate -
princeps obsoniorum.

“I speak not of your grown porkers - things between pig and pork - those hobbydehoys; but a young and tender suckling; under a moon old, guiltless as yet of the sty, with no original speck of the
amor immunditiœ
, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest - his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble - the mild forerunner or
prœludium
of a grunt.

“He must be roasted.
I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled - but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!

“There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, ‘crackling,’ as it is well called; the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance, with the adhesive oleaginous - O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it - the tender blossoming of fat - fat cropped in the bud, taken in the shoot, in the first innocence - the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food: the lean, not lean, but a kind of animal manna, or rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance.

“Behold him, while he is ‘doing’: it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth than a scorching heat that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age! - he hath wept out his pretty eyes - radiant jellies, shooting stars!

“See him in the dish, his second cradle: how meek he lieth! Wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal, wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation. From these sins he is happily snatched away: