A friend wanted some Saveloy sausage for a recipe, which was a perfect opportunity to try the recipe in Bartolommeo Scappi’s Opera.
From the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570)
- To make mortadella (the largest of all sausages, originally made in Bologna) from lean meat of a domestic pig’s leg, wrapped in a caul.
Get ten pounds of the above meat without any bone, skin or gristle, which meat has both fat and lean. Beat it with knives on a table, …. After the lean meat has been beaten you can also make saveloy sausages of it using the caul or intestines – for every ten pounds of it putting in a pound and a half of grated Parmesan cheese, an ounce and a half of ground cinnamon, another ounce and a half of ground pepper, and eighth of an ounce of saffron, half a beaker of cool water and three ounces of salt. When you have mixed all that together, you make the saveloy sausage with the caul or the intestines and cook them as above.
after deboning and trimming the pork roast I was given to work with, I had three pounds of pork. I chopped it and put it through a coarse grinder, then added a lb of Parmesan cheese (because I messed up in my conversion from kg to lb), 1 oz of salt, .5 oz of cinnamon, .5 oz of pepper, about 1/2 tsp of saffron. That was a wild guess because my kitchen scale wasn’t sensitive enough for what should have been 1/24 oz of saffron. I did all the spices by weight rather than volume, as I was assuming that was what Scappi had intended. I also added about a cup of water, since I had no idea how big Scappi’s beaker might have been.
I tested a bit of the sausage after adding just under half the cheese and it was fine but a bit peppery. I let everything rest overnight before getting more cheese and adding it, then putting the whole mixture through the grinder a second time and stuffing it into casings. By coincidence, I ran out of casing at the same time as I got to the bit of sausage that needs to be stuffed by hand, so I simply made it into patties and fried it up. It is still peppery, and cinnamon isn’t as strong as I expected, but I am happy with the amount of saffron. In future, I would consider using more finely ground pepper, as my hand grinder is fairly coarse. I expected the added cheese to make a lot more difference than it did; Scappi’s recommended amount is definitely enough to give the Saveloy its flavour.
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