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