Hungarian Sausage Loaf

The recipe sounds really good, but it confuses me. Scroll down and read it again; its either unfinished or very poorly edited. Step 2 is the problem; do you combine the mushrooms, eggs and breadcrumbs together and use it as a crust for the sausage loaf, or do you combine all that stuff with the sausage and then form the whole mess into a loaf? MARY MOTHER OF GOD, SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME!

In order to untangle this culinary mess I turned to our Hungarian Cuisine Correspondent, Szélső Fa. Her advice was this:

"As a practicing chef-at-home, housewife and mother of two I have the right to claim that you combine the things to cover the sausage - to make a crust, as you suggested over the sausage.

On the other hand, forming the whole bunch of ingredients into ONE SINGLE loaf does fit Hungarian gastronomy as well."

Do you see why she's my very favorite Hungarian of all time? She's so slippery. I love the way she claims confidently that the breadcrumbs are most definitely there to form a crust, but then she totally takes it all back with her next sentence, leaving me exactly where I was to begin with. This lady is slick; she should have been an ambassador. So still we don't know for sure how this is put together. There was no other choice. I had to know.

Unless you plan on making your own sausage, this recipe is very inexpensive and simple, and would be great to work on with kids who are of the helping age. The most labor intensive part of the job was dicing the mushrooms, which didn't really take that long considering I was doing it left handed with the wrong kind of knife on a paper plate on an over-crowded counter top while trying to take pictures with the other hand. I'm not a professional, folks.

Once I got the 'shrooms ready, I cooked 'em. I'd never bought fresh mushrooms before, let alone diced and sautéed them. Holy shit, these things smelled so good! I almost didn't have Hungarian Sausage Loaf because I was very sincerely tempted to just sauté a bunch of mushrooms for dinner. I knew when I was cooking these I was going to like the final product, just because they smelled so fantastic.

I have to report that Szélső Fa was wrong... and right. I told you, she's crafty. The point is, there are WAY too many bread crumbs to form a crust. It just wouldn't work, no matter how hard I tried. It was gonna have to be a loaf, and even then putting this many breadcrumbs into this amount of meat took a lot of kneading. A LOT. There were several times I was certain that there was no way it was all going to come together, but determination, true grit, and my manly piledrivin' fists of steel eventually pummeled the mass into a cohesive whole which I was able to shape into a loaf. I don't have pics of any of this because my hands were covered with smooshed up pork and raw eggs, and I thought it best not to touch my camera.

Ain't that purty? One teaspoon of paprika doesn't sound like a lot, but for a loaf this size its a ton. I thought about leaving some out, but I decided I follow the recipe to the letter and see how it turned out. Turns out its not too much after all; baking it really mellows the paprika and gives it a sort of smoky flavor, which was very nice.

If this were a kosher recipe, this would be the place where I would make an ill-advised Holocaust joke in poor taste. Guess I'll have to save it for my Hanukkah article.

You'll notice that I don't have any pictures of the final cooked loaf. That's because by the time it was done baking it smelled so good and I was so hungry that I looked at the loaf, thought about this article, and said "Fuck it" out loud to the empty kitchen. Hungarian Sausage Loaf is damn tasty, folks. The next time I make it I will experiment by upping the mushroom content to 1½ cups sautéed in 3 tablespoons of butter along with a quarter cup of finely diced onions and a half teaspoon of cracked black pepper, but really the recipe is just fine as is.

Hungarian Sausage Loaf is dense. I don't know who Cutco was planning on feeding back in 1961, but this makes WAY more than four servings. Since pork sausage is mainly considered a breakfast food here in the States, and since I had plenty left over, I decided to make a breakfast out of it the next morning. I fried two eggs, a hash brown patty, and used the rest of the mushrooms to cover the slice of nuked loaf. Serve with a tall glass of OJ and a pat of salted butter melted over the loaf. Phenomenal.

I also made a second loaf, only instead of pork sausage I used goetta. For you poor, poor pitiful people who don't know what goetta is, its a very mild German sausage made with pork, beef, oats, sunshine, baby smiles, the laughter of children, and the love and blessings of all the holiest of holy people whom have ever lived, all mashed up in a solid gold meat grinder, and packaged by the highest choir of angels, who seal each and every roll with a divine kiss. It is quite simply the best meat product ever made by human beings, and it is very popular here in the greater Cincinnati area. I thought, being the food of whatever god or gods you might believe in, it would be almost guaranteed to bring the loaf to new heights, but no. The flavor of the goetta is too delicate, and it gets lost in the flavor of the breadcrumbs and buttered mushrooms. You're better off sticking with the stronger flavor of pork sausage. Its good eats.