A snack to keep the Christmas peace

A sanity-saving recipe for sausage rolls

Photo by Norman Tsui on Unsplash

Since I don’t come close to the arts of Dickens, Tolstoy, Hemingway, _________ (insert your most admired writer), it’s unlikely you would read Tabled on its usual Wednesday delivery. That’s Christmas Day. You will have other preoccupations. So here it is today, with a recipe for something that in my view is the Christmas food equivalent of an aspirin - an essential cure to clear all complaints and restore all spirits.

I give you the sausage roll.

Over the course of the two- or three-day festivities, there will inevitably occur more than a few occasions when your nearest and dearest will clamour at the most inconvenient and busiest moment for something to eat. This always happens in the fallow period between meals when obviously nothing has been catered for. Nevertheless, the demand will arise.

You doubtless have your own tried-and-tested recipe for sausage rolls. It may go back generations and come attached to a sentimental piece of family history. It will not be as good as mine. I can say that with absolute confidence because the recipe isn’t mine. I’ve purloined it from the person behind the UK’s equivalent of The Best Recipe from Cooks’ Illustrated.

Like America’s Test Kitchen, Felicity Cloake tests every recipe out there (and despite the humble nature of the snack, it turns out there are many) for her column in The Guardian, to come up with the best version of it. Only the photo that illustrates the recipe is mine.

Wrapping ground meat in pastry is nothing new. The creation goes back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. It’s the latter who are thought to have introduced it, along with roads that didn’t meander round drunkenly wavering hedged boundaries, to the uncouth Britons in their conquest of the British Isles in 43 AD. Apparently, the natives took readily to the Luganega variety of Roman sausage. Produced today in Lombardy, Trentino and the Veneto, the Luganega is spiced with black pepper, cumin, bay laurel berries, mint, parsley, and rue, and often sold as ‘salsiccia a metro’, sausage by the metre’, like the long coil of the Cumberland sausage.

The fresh sausages we are familiar with originated in the late 19th century, in France, although the French had been making dry, salted saucissons - the word deriving from salsus, the Latin for salted - since Roman times, and exporting them across the Roman Empire. Fresh sausages quickly became popular in London as a cheap street food. Today, the UK chain Greggs has taken that role over commercially, adding pastry and selling over 2 million hot sausage rolls every week.

I give you Felicity Cloake’s recipe, the instructions tweaked a little for ease. But with everything else you need to prepare for Christmas feasting, I appreciate you may not feel willing to stick to the precise details of it. Not to worry. Buy the best pork sausages to substitute for the minced pork belly and instead of the pork shoulder, roughly chop up pork chops with a meat cleaver or sharp knife. (This adds a nice bit of texture but you can omit it entirely). And buy ready-made butter puff pastry. But do NOT leave out the lemon zest!

Sausage rolls by me. Festive Christmas cloth by Pinkmomentmonograms.com

If you want to make your own pastry:
225g/10 oz plain flour
Pinch of salt
2 teaspoons English mustard powder
175g/6¼ oz very cold butter
1 egg, beaten

Sift the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and grate in the butter. Stir all together with a knife till it resembles a rough crumble mixture. Pour over enough ice-cold water (about 115ml/scant 4 fl oz) and use the knife again to turn the mixture into a dough that comes away cleanly from the bowl, then use your hands to quickly bring it together into a ball. Refrigerate, covered, 30 minutes.

For the filling:
300g/10½ oz pork belly, skin discarded, minced or finely chopped
300g/10½ oz pork shoulder, minced (or buy ready-minced)
200g/7 oz smoked streaky bacon, rind removed, finely chopped
Zest of 1 large lemon
Nutmeg, grated
2 tablespoons roughly chopped thyme leaves
8 sage leaves, roughly chopped
Salt and black pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 220C/425F.

Thoroughly mix all the meats together in a large bowl with your hands. Add everything else and mix again.

Roll the pastry out to about ½ cm/scant ¼ in thick, and cut into 3 lengths. Divide the meat into 3 and roll between wet palms into sausages as long as your pastry, and place each one slightly off-centre on each strip.

Brush one edge of the pastry strip with water and then fold the other side over to enclose the sausagemeat. Press down to seal, and then go along the edge with the back of a fork to make a pattern. This it also ensures a seal. Brush with the beaten egg, and cut to the desired size. If that is to make large, several-bites sausage rolls, prick each with a fork to release steam. Repeat till all are created.

Put the rolls on a baking tray, and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden. Cool on a rack, and serve warm, with a bowl of mustard if you like.

Have a happy, happy and peaceful Christmas!