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Sausages, Sauce For
Lift the sausages from the pan, and put them upon a sieve before a fire to drain. Pour away all the fat excepting about a table-spoonful, and if the fat in which the sausages were fried is at all burnt, dissolve a little fresh butter or fat in a clean saucepan. Stir into this as much flour as will make a smooth paste, rub it briskly over the fire until it is brightly browned, moisten gradually with boiling water or boiling stock till it is as thick as cream, add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup or walnut pickle, and if necessary a spoonful of browning. Boil the sauce for a few minutes, place the sausages in a dish, and strain the sauce over them. Send mustard to table with them. Time to make the sauce, ten to fifteen minutes. The above ingredients will make sufficient sauce for a pound of sausages.
A pan gravy built in the sausage fat, of the kind that fills the sauce chapters of late Victorian manuals. The quantities are given by feel rather than measure, so the notes below fix the proportions.
- The hinge: brown the roux, do not burn itThe colour of this sauce comes almost entirely from cooking flour and fat together until they are, in the book's words, brightly browned — several minutes over moderate heat, stirred constantly. Take it too far and it turns bitter and loses thickening power, which is why the recipe tells you to start again with fresh fat if the sausage drippings have caught.
- Working proportionsAbout 1 tablespoon of fat to 1 tablespoon of flour, moistened with roughly 1 cup (240 ml) of boiling water or stock, gives the quantity the recipe claims: enough for a pound of sausages, serving three or four.
- "As thick as cream"This means pouring cream, not whipped or clotted — a sauce that coats a spoon thinly and runs off freely. Add the liquid a little at a time and stop when it reaches that point; a brown roux thickens less than a white one, so you may need less liquid than you expect.
- Mushroom ketchup and walnut pickleBoth are dark, salty condiments rather than anything sweet or tomato-based: mushroom ketchup is salted mushroom liquor, walnut pickle a spiced vinegar. Mushroom ketchup is still made commercially in Britain; failing either, a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or a dash of soy plus a little vinegar gives a comparable savoury sharpness.
- "Browning"Victorian browning was burnt-sugar caramel sold in bottles, used purely for colour. Modern gravy browning is the same idea. It is optional — if the roux is properly browned the sauce will not need it.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, on the assumption that the sausage fat and the ketchup carry it. Taste at the end; if you used unsalted stock the sauce will need salt and a good grind of pepper.
- Keeping the sausages warm"Upon a sieve before a fire" means a rack in front of the hearth, letting fat drain while the sausages stay hot. A rack set over a tray in a 200°F (95°C) oven does the same job for the ten to fifteen minutes the sauce takes.
- StrainingThe sauce is strained over the sausages to catch any flour lumps or burnt sediment. Skip it only if the roux is smooth and the pan was clean.
Cassell's treats this as a matter of principle rather than a set dish: fry the meat, deglaze the pan, build a brown roux, sharpen it with a bottled condiment. That last step is the period marker. Mushroom ketchup and pickled walnut liquor were the standard British savoury seasonings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long predating tomato ketchup in general use, and a well-stocked Victorian larder kept both alongside anchovy essence and Harvey's sauce. Bottled "browning" — caramelised sugar — was sold for the same reason cooks now reach for gravy granules: to make a sauce look as rich as it tastes when the roux has come out pale. The instruction to send mustard to table with sausages recurs often enough in English cookery of the period to look like a habit, mustard being commonly said to accompany fried or boiled pork.