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Fowl, Sausages Of
As an accompaniment to fricassees, or any made dish of fowl, make sausages of veal or poultry. Take equal quantities of the lean white part of the meat and fine bread-crumbs. Scrape half a pound of lean ham, and season with parsley, lemon-thyme, pounded mace, salt, and pepper. Mix all together with the yolk of an egg and a little milk, and roll into sausages. Fry in butter a light brown. Or, chop the remains of a turkey or fowl, and mix with fat bacon in equal quantities. Pound the mixture in a mortar with an anchovy, a little sage, salt, and pepper. Fry these sausages as a nice supper dish, and garnish with fried sippets. A sweetbread with sausages piled round it is excellent.
Two versions of a skinless forcemeat sausage: one built from raw white meat, one from cooked leftovers. Both are shaped without casings, so the binding and the pan temperature decide whether they hold together.
- The hinge: bind and chillEgg yolk and a little milk are the only glue in the first version, and a wet mixture will slump in the pan. Mix, then chill the shaped sausages at least 30 minutes before frying so they set.
- The proportions are incomplete"equal quantities" of white meat and breadcrumbs is given without a total weight, while the ham is fixed at half a pound. A workable guess is about 1 lb meat to 1 lb crumbs; use dry, fine crumbs rather than fresh coarse ones or the paste turns pasty.
- "Scrape" the hamScraping with a knife blade shreds cured ham into fine threads without mashing it, the pre-mincer way of getting an even distribution. A few pulses in a food processor does the same job.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today as blades or ready-ground. A quarter teaspoon ground is enough for this quantity; it is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg.
- Anchovy in the second versionOne salted or oil-packed fillet, pounded to nothing, works as seasoning rather than flavour of fish. Reduce the added salt accordingly, since both the anchovy and the bacon carry plenty.
- Cook them throughThe first version uses raw poultry or veal, so "a light brown" is not the test. Fry in butter over medium heat, 8 to 10 minutes, turning, to an internal 165F; butter alone will scorch if the pan is too hot, so add a little oil.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter until crisp, a common garnish of the period for soft or saucy dishes. Cut them thin and fry them last so they stay dry.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads need ordering from a butcher and are usually soaked, blanched, peeled of membrane and pressed before cooking. If that is more than you want, the sausages stand perfectly well on their own with a spoonful of the fricassee sauce.
Forcemeat sausages of this kind belong to a tradition in which a "sausage" could mean a seasoned meat paste bound with breadcrumbs and egg and shaped by hand, without a casing, while casings remained standard for the butcher's pork sausage. The second version makes the household economy plain, using "the remains of a turkey or fowl" from an earlier meal. Mace, anchovy, lemon thyme and sage are common savoury seasonings in nineteenth-century English forcemeat, and the anchovy in particular functions much as fish sauce does in other cuisines, adding depth without announcing itself. The suggestion of piling them round a sweetbread reflects a period when offal was neither cheap nor apologised for.