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By this time, the Sunday opening controversy and its religious implications made it to the front page.
There are few usable cake recipes in this number, though there is an interesting continuation of a series on commercial bread making on pp. 35-6.
Surprisingly more interesting – though for non-baking reasons – there are various recipes for sausages on p. 41. These do not have any of what we call “additives” today, at least as a matter of course. Saltpetre is not mentioned at all, though “if the weather is very hot, and [the sausages] may remain on hand for a few days,” the maker can add some salicyllic acid (usually at that time an extract from willow trees), or – more worryingly, “a sufficient quantity of some meat preservative you use and approve of.” I hope the “red colouring” referred to was natural and not the red lead that was sometimes used (ads in the supplement of the next issue reassure the reader that their food colourings are safe). Making sausages also requires a sausage machine which few of us have at home today (though we do have food processors).
Far more interesting than any of the above, however, is the reason given why bakers and confectioners might consider making their own sausages beyond the fact that “several Yorkshire confectioners … are quite as celebrated for their sausages, as for their pies.” It is of course economical but also…
[Making sausages] uses up stale bread, helps with sausage rolls, meat sandwiches, forcemeat for fowl stuffing or galantines, patties of the more delicate type, for the foundation of the now popular iced meat creams, which appear at garden parties, balls, afternoon teas ; and wherever the new woman and the reformed man gather together they enjoy a soupcon of the savoury amidst the sweets of life.
Historians of gender will immediately prick up their ears at the mention of the “new woman and the reformed man”. We knew about the New Woman’s relationship to fashion, art, cigarettes, theatre and bicycles – but who knew that sausage meat too could profitably be associated in late 1890s baking and confectionary with risque, liberated, independent, modern women and their male supporters?
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