Chinook Sausages: or, Economical deep fried breakfast

Do the ingrates in your home demand steak three times a day with no regard for the budget? You don't need to put rat poison in the hashed mutton, Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger is here to help!

Chinook Sausage 2 oz dried beef, or ¾-1 cup leftover meat* 2 white or yellow onions ½ tsp powdered thyme ½ tsp black pepper 1 cup cornmeal 2 cups water Flour for coating Run the meat and onions through the food processor. Place in a saucepan. Add thyme, pepper, cornmeal, and water. Cook over medium heat until it is very thick. (It should just about hold up a spoon.) Allow to cool completely. Scoop out portions of this mixture and roll it into sausages. Roll these in flour. Fry until golden-brown. Serve hot with white or brown gravy. You can make these the night before, refrigerate them, and fry them the next day. *If using leftover meat, add 1 teaspoon salt. Note: These are very good if you stir in about ½ cup shredded provolone or mozzarella. Add the cheese as soon as you take the pot off the stove, stir until melted, and then allow to cool before shaping. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 29 September 1919, page 12

Evening Public Ledger, 29 September 1919, page 12

 Today, Philadelphia's cooking columnist extraordinaire comes to the aid of a constant reader who has to take in lodgers who apparently don't appreciate the food she puts on the table. Exasperation fills "A Constant Reader's" one-paragraph plea, culminating with "These men seem to think I should have a steak three times a day, which is entirely out of the question."

Mrs. Wilson's tips are still useful today: buy foods in bulk, make good use of leftovers, cook ahead of time whenever possible, etc. She suggests serving a lot of potatoes (fair advice in any era), making pancake and cornbread batter ahead of time and refrigerating it, and tells how to easily make eight omelets at a time in the oven (while stretching your eggs with breadcrumbs).

Mrs. Wilson's domestic-science credentials really come through when she brings men's bowels into a cookery column. She directly addresses this three-steaks-a-day nonsense: "To provide eight healthy men with meat three times a day would really be doing them an injury. Eating meat constantly like this would in time lead to serious intestinal disorders."

As we noted in an earlier post, digestion and digestibility were big business in the early days of home economics. Even in this modern time when we've realized that fresh greens are good for you without boiling them to a paste, I have to agree with Mrs. Wilson's take on excess meat. I'm not necessarily worried about destroying men's digestive tracts with three steaks a day, but I don't think the bathroom fan could keep up with the aftermath.

But enough about early 20^th century domestic science (and its peculiar obsession with one's internal business). Let's get to the sausages. At the bottom of the recipe, Mrs. Wilson notes that "corned beef or other meat may be used to replace the dried beef." And so, with Mrs. Wilson's blessing, last night's dinner and a lot of onions got shoved through the meat grinder.

You may wonder where we found the means to pulverize so much meat. For various complicated economic reasons, pork has been astonishingly cheap of late. Or at least, the big roasts have been cheap. As I have speculated in earlier posts, I think a lot of people believe a 7-pound anvil of meat is a daunting project whereas the pre-sliced pork chops and ever-present boneless skinless chicken breasts seem friendlier. Regardless of whether I'm right about this or not, big pork roasts are cheap(ish) these days.

And so, following grocery the budget where it leads us, I decided we would have a "Sunday roast" every week like the people in those exported British TV shows. While there has been no objection to a weekly slab of meat, the leftovers tend to languish until I discreetly dispatch them to the municipal hereafter. Since no one was eating the extra meat anyway, it was a blank canvas of cut-price protein for me to use however I want.

Getting back to the sausages, Mrs. Wilson's recipe goes together unexpectedly fast. It's therefore perfect for someone who has eight ungrateful lodgers and a million chores to do. After a short(ish) time at the meat grinder, we could get everything into the pot and onto the stove.

You know the saying "It's going to look worse before it looks better?"

We are directed to make a meat-infused cornmeal mush after grinding our ingredients. I am fine with this, but I made a ruinous mistake with the first batch. We didn't have normal cornmeal, but we had the kind you use for tortillas. I thought it's the same thing, but more finely ground. It is not.

As a result of out ill-advised substitution, our mush never set. It thickened a little bit, but it remained too goopy to shape into sausages no matter how long I stirred it over a hot burner. Because onions are too beautiful to waste, I gamely plopped it by the spoonful onto a flour-coated plate and flattened it into patties. After letting them spend the night in the refrigerator in the hopes that they'd firm up (they didn't), I fried them the next day.

We didn't have any cooking oil. But we do have a lot of beef fat in the freezer. If you ever get nostalgic for "the old McDonald's fries," this moment may mean a lot to you.

We dropped our first Chinook patties into the hot fat, which spattered and reminded me why (aside from diet-watching) I never fry anything unless paper towels are on sale. 

 

The casual prevalence of deep frying in older recipes astounds me. It's popular to joke about how Americans can and will fry anything, but I don't know many people who do it at home unless it's a special occasion. Or at least, people don't get out a deep fryer without saying something like "I thought we'd have something really special tonight!" Apparently people in Mrs. Wilson's day would routinely put a vat of hot fat on the stove almost as routinely as we start a pot of boiling water. 

I thought our sausage patties would firm up in the hot fat the same way pancake batter turns into funnel cakes. But frying merely added a brown crust to the otherwise unchanged goo.

 Because I wanted to see if these were still good without immersing them in fat, I put one of our "sausage" patties onto a hot griddle. And... let's just say you want to deep-fry these.

After these goopy things failed to turn into sausages, I was willing to discard the entire mess and mutter that even Mrs. Wilson has dud recipes sometimes. But as aforementioned, we didn't use the right type of cornmeal in this. In the name of testing the Chinook sausages as Mrs. Wilson intended them (and also because shoving leftovers through a meat grinder is therapeutic), I obtained cornmeal and made them again.

It turns out that when you actually use the ingredients listed in a recipe, it's more likely to turn out right. After a few minutes on the stove, our cornmeal mush became thick enough to hold up a spoon. It felt like slightly gritty Play-Doh. And so, like children making clay worms, we turned it into sausages.

It looks more impressive when you have a whole plate of them.

Upon tasting the sausage mixture as it was meant to be, I thought it needed cheese. I don't mean that cheese would make the sausages better. I mean it seemed like cheese was missing. I put a big steaming spoonful of hot Chinook mush into a bowl and stirred in a handful of shredded mozzarella until it was melted. And indeed, it tasted complete. I don't think you need a lot of cheese to make this recipe taste right. It just needs that little bit of extra cheesy lift, not a Wisconsin-grade dairy infusion.

Because I didn't want to waste any beef fat (even though I have a lot of it), I got out the smallest pan in the house. I think you're supposed to cook individual fried eggs in it.

After turning the sausage to reveal the golden-colored underside, I briefly thought I should call these "mock fish sticks." They look like fish sticks to me.

Mrs. Wilson's Chinook sausages tasted like something caught between Thanksgiving turkey stuffing and onion rings. I've heard that fried turkey stuffing is a thing some people do with their holiday leftovers, so this recipe doesn't seem very farfetched.  Had I used a bigger frying pan, I can easily imagine putting them into the oil at once and cranking them out for hungry lodgers.

I liked these sausages a lot more than I expected to. Yes, deep-frying them definitely helps the recipe a lot. But if you're going to get out the deep fryer and spatter grease all over your stove, this is a pretty good recipe to do it with. If you can spare a few more coins from your purse than someone with eight lodgers to feed, you should definitely add cheese.