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Jewish Sausages, or Chorissa
This is used as an accompaniment to boiled fish and other dishes, and is often met with at Jewish tables. It is purchased of the Jew butchers, and is cooked in the following way. Place the chorissa in warm water, let it heat gently, and then boil for twenty minutes. Serve, surrounded with rice made ready as for curry. Jewish sausages are very good broiled in slices after the previous boiling. They should be quite cold before being put again to the fire. One authority is of opinion that they will be found more digestible, as well as pleasanter to the taste, if they are half-boiled at least before being broiled, toasted, or warmed in the oven for the table.
This is less a recipe than a set of handling notes for a bought sausage, of the kind Cassell's often gave for ingredients its readers would not make at home. The instructions still work, with a few translations.
- What chorissa isAnglo-Jewish sources describe chorissa as a spiced beef sausage sold by kosher butchers, and the name is usually linked to Spanish chorizo; the recipe itself says nothing of its ingredients. The closest modern equivalents are sold as beef chorizo or kosher garlic sausage; buy one that is cured and firm rather than a fresh raw sausage, which behaves differently in water.
- Start cold, heat gentlyThe direction to put the sausage into warm water and bring it up slowly matters. A hard-cured sausage dropped into fast-boiling water splits its casing and sheds most of its fat into the pot.
- Twenty minutesThat is generous for a cured sausage of ordinary thickness and will leave it soft and rather washed out. If the sausage is fresh rather than cured, treat the time as a guide only and cook to 160F/71C at the centre.
- "Rice made ready as for curry"In books of this period rice for curry generally meant plain rice boiled in plenty of salted water, drained and dried off so the grains separated. No spicing is indicated here; any well-drained plain rice serves.
- The half-boilThe original gives digestibility and flavour as the reasons; in practice, poaching the sausage part-way also renders some fat and firms the interior, so the slices are likelier to brown on the grill than burst.
- Cold before broilingChill the boiled sausage thoroughly before slicing. Warm sausage crumbles under the knife; cold sausage cuts into clean rounds that hold their shape over heat.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon a sausage of about 8 oz to serve two alongside fish and rice, or four as a garnish.
Chorissa is the Anglicised spelling of a sausage said to have been carried into Britain by Sephardi Jewish families whose ancestors are traditionally held to have left Spain and Portugal, and it is generally traced to the same root as Spanish chorizo and heavily seasoned with garlic and paprika. Its appearance in Cassell's, alongside the note that it must be bought from a Jewish butcher, suggests that the compilers expected their readers to encounter it as a bought delicacy rather than a home production. The pairing with boiled fish is suggestive of its context, since fish was the standard Sabbath and festival dish in Anglo-Jewish kitchens. The editor's note at the head of the page speaks for itself about the language of the period.