On A Roll
They’re probably the most popular at a party, get along famously with just about anyone that gives them the time of day, they’re not the ‘look-at-me-look-at-me’ type yet neither are they socially inept. Too good to be true? Well, just about everyone I know think they’re pretty good too! I say ‘just about everyone’ because you wouldn’t if you were vegetarian or vegan.
The ‘they’ I’m referring to is the humble sausage roll. There’s a great little cafe in the main street of Waipukurau called ‘The Lilypond’. You can buy some delectable homemade treats to take the famished feeling out of a hungry apetite there (the savouries hot shelf always has mouth-watering quiche and someone there makes sausage rolls like my Mum used to). All the other usual pastry suspects are there too. I give it a wide berth on account of savouries are my archilles!
A sausage roll is more your convenience food commonly served at parties and available from bakeries as a takeaway food item. The formula for a sausage roll is very simple, it’s a sheet of puff pastry sliced into two and wrapped into tubes around a filling of sausage meat blended with softer ingredients such as milk-soaked bread, onion and egg before being cooked.
They can be served either hot or cold, variations on the basic recipe have also included herbs and spices. A more gourmet version of the sausage roll is made by using some variety of sausage or frankfurter as the filling. When the filling consists of beef fillet the dish is known as a ‘Beef Wellington’.
You’d be hard pressed to find a New Zealand kid whose mother didn’t know how to make a sausage roll or at the very least know a good place to buy one, they’ve been a National favourite forever, not just here I might add but all around the world. Yet attribution is a funny thing, it brings out the worst in us all.
In fact a few of my aussie mates will tell you that EVERYTHING from pavlova to neenish tarts were made by their forebears first! So they’re theirs. I think if they scratched the surface of their wonderful convict heritage they’d find that they’d better attribute a good deal more of their cookery history to their British forebears and European immigrants. Plus food is universal in all its forms and fame. You say potatoe I say potato, you say tomatoe I say tomato. For the sake of international relations, let’s call it a draw.
I like to tell this story because it always puts this trans-tasman competitiveness in perspective for me. On one of my first visits to a supermarket in Sydney, I couldn’t believe how cheap baking ingredients were. Flour, butter, sugar and eggs. All the bits, they were just so cheap. When I rocked up to the check out counter with my cache of goodies the young girl looked at me quizzically and asked what I was going to use all this ‘stuff’ for. I replied, “baking!” She looked mortified. True story, she told me she didn’t know anyone that actually baked! Now that’s my definition of sad! To be fair though, she’d be an exceptional to the rule, I have a handful of aussie mates that DO bake, occasionally.
Now technically speaking a sausage roll could come under the heading of a pie since a pie is a baked dish that is usually made of a pastry dough shell that covers or completely contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Pies can be either “filled” where a dish is covered by pastry and the filling is placed on top of that, “top-crust,” where the filling is placed in a dish and covered with a pastry/potato mash top before baking, or “two-crust,” with the filling completely enclosed in the pastry shell. Pies can be a variety of sizes, ranging from bite-size to ones designed for multiple servings.
In English cookery history the first pies were called ‘coffins’ or ‘coffyns’. These were savory meat pies with the crusts or pastry being tall and straight-sided with sealed-on floors and lids. Open-crust pastry had no tops or lids and were known as ‘traps’. These pies held assorted meats and sauce components and were baked more like a modern casserole with no pan, the crust itself was the pan and its pastry tough and inedible.
The purpose of a pastry shell was mainly to serve as a storage container and serving vessel since these are often too hard to actually eat. A small pie was known as a tartlet and a tart was a large shallow open pie, this is still their definition in England today. Pastry was a staple in medieval menus thus pastry-making was taken for granted by the majority of early cook book writers and recipes on what to make it with were not usually included. It wasn’t until the 16th century that cook books with pastry ingredients began appearing.
Food historians believed this was because cook books started appearing for the general household and not just for professional cooks. They speculated that the origins of the pie can loosely be traced back to the ancient Egyptians. Bakers in the Pharaoh’s kitchens incorporated nuts, honey and fruits in bread dough, a primitive form of pastry. Drawings of this can be found etched on the tomb walls of Ramses II located in the Valley of the Kings.
Some historians however believe that the Greeks actually made the first pie pastry. The pies during this period were from a flour-water paste wrapped around meat; this served to cook the meat and seal in the juices. The Romans, sampling the delicacy carried home recipes for making it. Sort of like the spoils of war when they conquered Greece. Records show that oysters, mussels, lampreys (an eel-like fish) and other meats and fish were also normal in Roman puddings. It is thought that the puddings were a lot like pies.
The delights of the pie spread throughout Europe via the Roman roads, where every country adapted the recipes to their customs and foods. Animated pies or pyes were the most popular banquet entertainment. The nursery rhyme “Sing a song of Sixpence refers to such a pie. According to the rhyme, “When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing. Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the King.” In all likelihood those birds not only sang but got out of there as soon as they could! And who wouldn’t I’d say!
They say that rabbits, frogs, turtles and other small animals, even small people (dwarfs) were set into pies, either alone or with birds to be released when the crust was cut. Personally I think that’s one of those tall tales about little people! The dwarf, so the story goes, would emerge and walk down the length of the table, reciting poetry, sketching the guests, or doing tricks.
However, there may be some substance to the carry on because it’s been said that in the 14th century during the King of France, Charles V’s (1364-1380) reign the important event at banquets was not dishes of food but acts such as minstrels, magicians, jugglers and dancers. The chefs entered into the fun by producing elaborate “soteltie” or “subtilty.”
Sotelties were food disguised in an ornamental way (sculptures made from edible ingredients but not always intended to be eaten or even safe to eat). In the 14th to 17th centuries the sotelty was not always a food but any kind of entertainment to include minstrels, troubadours, acrobats, dancers and other performers.
The sotelty was used to alleviate the boredom of waiting for the next course to appear and to entertain the guests. If possible, the sotelty was supposed to make the guests gasp with delight and to be amazed at the ingenuity of the sotelty maker. During this time period, the Duke of Burgundy’s chef made an immense pie which opened to the strains of 28 musicians playing from within the pie. Out of the pie came a captive girl representing the ‘captive’ Church in the Middle East.”
But, all of that’s a bit too fancy for me, I like my sausage rolls, au natural except on the very odd occasion when I choose to eat them with a smidgin of Watties tomato sauce. It’s simple food with no pretension. It pretends to be nothing other than what it is, something savoury but nice.
