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Potato Sausage
1/2 cupful Crisco 1/4 lb. chopped onions 1/2 lb. cold boiled mashed potatoes 1/2 lb. breadcrumbs Salt and pepper to taste 2 beaten eggs Mix all ingredients thoroughly well together with wooden spoon, then form into sausages; tie each well in cloth, and boil exactly as a roly-poly. If not to be eaten when newly cooked, put aside, and untie when wanted. This sausage is also good if oatmeal is added instead of breadcrumbs, or it may be made half oatmeal and half breadcrumbs.
Sufficient for twelve sausages.
A meatless sausage built on potato and crumbs, poached in a cloth rather than a skin. The hinge is the wrapping: these have no casing and no binder beyond egg, so they hold their shape only if tied tightly and dropped into water that is already simmering.
- "Boil exactly as a roly-poly"That means a floured pudding cloth wrapped around the shaped roll, tied at both ends and in the middle, then lowered into water and cooked covered. The recipe gives no time; judge by firmness. Keep the water at a steady simmer rather than a hard boil.
- Cloth substitutesDoubled cheesecloth or a clean cotton napkin, well floured, is closest to the original. Parchment tied with string inside a foil outer wrap also works and is easier to unwrap cleanly.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Any solid shortening, or butter, does the same job here; a half cupful is roughly 4 oz, a generous amount for the quantity of mixture.
- Weights into volumeHalf a pound of mashed potato is about a cup. Half a pound of breadcrumbs is roughly 4 to 5 cups fresh and soft, or about 2 cups dried and fine -- use the fresh, since dried crumbs will drink the mixture stiff and dry.
- The onionsA quarter pound of raw chopped onion goes in uncooked. Sweating it in a little of the shortening first, then cooling before mixing, gives a milder, more evenly cooked result.
- Oatmeal variation"Oatmeal" here most likely means medium or pinhead oatmeal, though rolled oats were also available when the book was written. If using rolled oats, pulse them briefly so they bind rather than sit in flakes.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives twelve sausages. It says only that they may be set aside and untied when wanted; slicing and frying the cold, firm sausages in a little fat is a modern suggestion rather than the book's direction.
- KeepingThe recipe assumes a cold larder. Leave them tied and refrigerate no more than two days; they contain egg and cooked potato and will not keep at room temperature.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to put Crisco, launched in 1911, into American kitchens -- which is why shortening turns up in a dish that older cookbooks would have made with suet or dripping. The sausage itself is British in method: a meatless mixture bound with egg and crumbs, shaped and poached in a pudding cloth just as a jam roly-poly was, a technique that let a cook produce something sausage-shaped without a butcher or casings. Meatless potato-and-crumb mixtures of this sort belong to the economy cookery of the period, and such shifts became more pressing with wartime meat shortages later in the decade.