I’ve done several fish sausages over the years, and I’m always asked the same question: “Fish sausage? Really??”
Yes. I believe it was actually a commonly eaten dish (for folks with access to fresh fish, which includes a great deal of Scotland), prepared with or without some type of casing, just as it is today. Sausages of all kinds were commonly eaten, for reasons already stated elsewhere in this study. But, we find few actual recipes, which is not surprising, because they often contain bits of this and bits of that, combined into one dish. One example, which I’ve seen in several sources, combines the liver of one species with the scraped neck meat of another. Eat what you have, and eat all of it.
One of the recipes we redacted for an Upper Crust book project (12 or 15 years ago), a 14th century manuscript of a Neapolitan cookbook, was a recipe for fish sausage. In the 14th century!! We’ve done fish sausages, joyfully, ever since!
This is a photo of a salmon sausage that we first made at West/AnTir War, for the Cooks’ Play-date Camp and made several times since, that uses a combination of smoked and fresh fish. I have seen that combination used, as well, and it makes a lot of sense to stretch small amounts of fresh fish with fish from your preserved stores.
Below are a few sausage recipes from a 1616 Danish cookbook that show fish sausage examples both with and without casings of any kind:
XLIV. Pike sausage.
Take some of the fish, the [milten] and the blood. Chope it with pepper, coriander, onion, thyme. Put it in the stomach and let it seethe with the fish.
LII. A different way.
If you want to make a good dish of big fish, then take the back off the pike, carp, bream or another big fish. Chop it in pieces, salt it and put it on a griddle and make it nicely brown. Make a broth over it as previously said in chapter 50 about the pike. Make then from the apples coriander as previously said and pour it over. In this way you can also make sausage and prepare the liver of Pike.
LV – To make sausage of chopped fish. If you want to make sausage of this fish then take cloves, nutmeg flowers, small raisins, saffron and mix it with each other. Make of it sausages each one finger long and put in seething water and let well seethe. When they are well cooked take them up and put over them a brown sauce. Take thin ale, vinegar and gingerbread, let this well seethe and throw in herbs to taste. If you want it quite good take good wine and small raisins (called corinths).
For my sausage recipe, I took a suggestion from the Danish source, above. I used a combination of fish that were found in medieval Scotland (mainly salmon and pollock), my own poudre forte (which contains cloves and nutmeg, among other 14th century spices) and added currants, as above. Likewise, I made a sauce of ale & vinegar, some of the poudre forte along with some additional cinnamon and a small amount of honey, which I then thickened with bread crumbs.
Delicious! It tasted like Scotland, and it tasted like the 14th century, to me, which was the purpose of this project in the first place. This recipe will remain in Beathog’s own Receipt Book, certainly.