[Sca-cooks] Takes on Hamburger history

[Terry Decker]

Do you worry about the effort or amount of work if you hire others to do it?

A sharp, heavy cleaver makes chopping a lot easier.  And a big mortar and 
pestle makes meat paste a simple, if strenuous proposition.  Chiquart calls 
for a dozen large mortars in his kitchen layout.  (IIRC, Scully provides 
more modern  comments on the uses Medieval kitchen equipment.)

Strainers and colanders are used to filter out oversize pieces left in the 
paste.

Bear


We have discussed chopping meat vs. grinding it previously.  Like Gunthar, 
the writers of this article also said "Pounding meat in order to tenderize 
it takes a lot of work (though it is easier than mincing). It was much more 
work than running it through a meat grinder."

They also highlight:
<<< But mechanical grinders were still rare items in the 1880s. A typical 
kitchen would not have had one when Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book was 
first published.

It was becoming clear to us that the critical step in the evolution of the 
hamburger was probably the availability of meat grinders. In 1897, a company 
called Landers, Frary and Clark launched their “universal food chopper. 
Originally marketed for chopping and grinding almost any food in the 
kitchen, today we would look at this object and refer to it as a meat 
grinder. >>>

also
<<< The ingredients were the same as the authentic Hamburg steak, but 
running the same meat through a grinder made a world of difference. Steak 
Hamburg turned into a completely different food once people switched from 
pounding to grinding. >>>

So, if meat grinders weren't available and folks didn't chop up the meat by 
hand because of the labor, how fine or chunky was the meat that was put into 
medieval sausages?

I would also say this is the answer to when people say a hamburger is period 
because all the ingredients are. The meat is period, but ground meat of this 
consistency really wasn't. They *could* make it, but few chose to and fewer 
still chose to put it between two slices of bread, which wasn't that similar 
to a modern, fluffy hamburger bun, anyway.

Another point, I know that a number of people have redacted and cooked 
medieval sausage recipes. I've got a number of these in the Florilegium. I 
suspect all of these used meat ground in a grinder.

So are we likely to be chopping up the meat to a finer texture than what the 
medieval sausage recipes were calling for?

Stefan