Overview
Epping Sausage is a historical English named formula associated with Epping in Essex. The preserved recipe uses beef with pork fat and bread, placing it within the commercial butcher tradition rather than a surviving protected regional industry.
Where it's from
The cut
Identity and terminology
The name appears in historical recipe and trade contexts, but there is no modern statutory definition. It is an archival regional formula rather than a standard sausage still made continuously today.
Composition and characteristics
Beef supplies the lean structure, pork fat gives succulence and bread binds moisture. Pepper, nutmeg, mace or herbs give the restrained seasoning typical of nineteenth-century British sausages.
Production and process
The meat and fat are minced, mixed with soaked bread and seasoning and stuffed as fresh links. The formula is raw and intended for prompt cooking.
History and regional forms
Epping was a market town on the route between London and rural Essex. Named food formulas from such towns often entered metropolitan cookbooks and butchers' manuals, carrying a place name even after the local commercial context faded.
Use, storage and related products
It may be fried or grilled and served with breakfast or mash. It is historically interesting as a beef-rich English sausage rather than a generic banger.
Recipe and cure
This is not a finished recipe. It is a window into how this meat is traditionally cured. Before you follow any process, run it through one of our curing calculators so the salt, cure and timings are right and safe for your own batch.
Make this — the measured Curesmith version →“Make this” opens the same cure as a measured recipe, scaled to your batch.
- Meat
- Beef chuck
- Cut
- Beef chuck
- Salt (%)
- 1.5
- Curing salt
- None
- Fermented
- No
- Smoked
- No
- Maturation
- ≤4°C for up to 2 days or freeze
- Basis
- per 1,000 g beef chuck
- Style
- Fresh beef, pork-fat and bread sausage; cook before eating
Ingredients
- Beef chuck100% · 1000 g
- Pork back fat35% · 350 g
- White bread, crust removed14.8% · 200 g
- Ice-cold water for soaking9.9% · 133.5 g
- Fine salt1.5% · 20 g
- Ground white pepper0.5% · 6.5 g
- Ground sage0.2% · 1.5 g
- Ground ginger0.06% · 0.8 g
- Ground nutmeg0.13% · 1.5 g
- Dried marjoram0.13% · 1.5 g
- Cayenne0.04% · 0.5 g
Method
- Soak bread in measured water for 5 minutes and press lightly; use the entire 200 g hydrated bread component.
- Chill beef, fat, bread and equipment to 0–3°C.
- Grind back fat through 6 mm and beef through 3 mm.
- Mix beef with salt until tacky.
- Add hydrated bread, spices and fat; mix evenly without smearing.
- Stuff into sheep casings and form links.
Safety. Historical formula, modern raw-meat controls apply. Keep chilled and cook thoroughly.