Wednesday 7 November 2012

Random recipes #22 - Birthday number

This month at Random Recipes, Dom suggested we should pick a book to cook from by counting along our bookshelves until we reach the date of our birthday. Now this is all very well if you separate your books by subject, but I don't, so counting along 13 books on the first shelf (my birthday is August 13th) brought up this little gem, which I've had since school days.


Assuming you don't want to know the atomic weight of Molybdenum or the square root of 397, I moved on to the shelf blow and counted 13 books along. Now I have a huge collection of exotic, interesting and historic recipe books from all over the world, yet the magic birthday system came up with.........

DELIA!!!


Actually this isn't my first copy of this book. When it was re-issued, I bought it to replace my old copy, bought in 1981, which is just about worn out (although I've not been able to bring myself to part with it yet)


Well-used, as you can see, so I thought I must have cooked just about everything in the book. Yet the random page it fell open at was a recipe I had never tried - Delia's version of home made pork sausages.


The only change I made to the recipe was to cook them in sunflower oil rather than lard, as  I no longer keep lard in the house. The sausage mixture was very obedient and easy to shape


And after frying looked quite appetising although rather dry.


We served them with mash, Savoy cabbage and onion gravy, and our verdict was that they tasted good but were, as we'd anticipated, quite dry.



I suspect that for health reasons, supermarket minced pork is very much leaner than it was when  Delia first wrote the recipe, and with no skins to keep the juices in, the result is a healthier but less appetising sausage. The ones my husband made based on a recipe in "Sausages" by Paul Gayler were far superior.

I am joining in Random Recipes over at Belleau Kitchen






5 comments:

Glenda Gee said...

I have the Delia cookbook too. I was just reading your blog and thinking I would try the sausage but don't think I will bother now! Thanks for the warning about them being dry.

Unknown said...

so there's a huge amount of press at the moment about lard not being the evil we think it is, it's a good animal fat and not bad for you... and would probably have made these sausages even more fabulous... I think they look lovely and have never made sausages so what would I know.. love Delia so she, no doubt, would... thanks so much for taking part, always love it when you do xx

Anonymous said...

I've never made sausages before. It's too bad they were dry, but they look good!

Ruth Ellis said...

These look really good! I have to confess I was a bit freaked out by lard for a long time, but slowly coming around to the fact that, since I can't eat dairy, it's a viable option for cooking with, and in all honesty, probably healthier than weird fake dairy free margarine! These seem like just the right amount of random - slightly out of the ordinary, but still a meal you're happy to eat at the end of it - that's what I'm hoping for next month, after my disaster this month!

Stacy said...

Your sausages look wonderful and dryness is what gravy is for! I am sure they were just perfect once that onion gravy was poured on. I love Delia and have many of her books but I don't have that one. Off to search on Ebay!