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Sausages, Stewed, with Chestnuts
Take one pound of delicate sausage-meat, seasoned with salt and cayenne, but without any herbs. Divide it into small round cakes three-quarters of an inch thick, and fry these in hot fat till they are lightly browned on both sides; drain them on a sieve. Throw half a hundred fine Spanish chestnuts into boiling water, and let them boil for eight or ten minutes. Dry them, and when nearly cool make a little incision in the outer skin of each nut to keep it from bursting. Roast the nuts, and when they are soft skin them. Pour the fat in which the sausages were fried into a delicately clean saucepan; then stir a tea-spoonful of flour smoothly into it, and beat the paste over the fire till it is lightly coloured. Add gradually half a pint of good stock, a small bunch of savoury herbs, and a seasoning of salt and cayenne. A glass of wine may be put in or not. Let the sauce boil up once, put in lightly the sausages and chestnuts, and simmer all gently together for an hour. Pile the chestnuts in the centre of a hot dish, arrange the sausages round them, and strain the sauce over all. Serve very hot. Probable cost, sausage-meat, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A pork-and-chestnut braise that reads oddly only in two places: the count of the chestnuts and the length of the simmer. Fix those and it works as written.
- The hinge: cut the simmerAn hour of gentle simmering will reduce peeled roasted chestnuts to mush and squeeze the fat and moisture out of the sausage cakes. Twenty to twenty-five minutes is enough to marry the sauce and heat everything through; add the chestnuts for the last ten if they are already very soft.
- "Half a hundred" chestnutsFifty nuts, which is roughly 2 lb / 900 g in the shell and about 1 lb 5 oz / 600 g peeled. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work; use about 500 g and skip the boiling and roasting entirely.
- Boil, then roastThe brief boil loosens both skins and the roasting dries and sweetens the nut, though the recipe gives no reason for the double treatment. Score each shell across the flat side; no oven heat is stated, but a modern 400F for 15-20 minutes works, peeling while hot, since the inner pellicle grips once cool.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Use a well-flavoured brown stock; the teaspoon of flour is a very light thickening, so the sauce should finish as a glossy jus rather than a gravy.
- A glass of wineA wineglass was conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the recipe does not define it. Madeira, sherry or a dry red all suit; add it with the stock so the alcohol cooks off.
- Sausage-meatBuy plain bulk pork sausage-meat, or squeeze the filling from good sausages. The instruction to leave out herbs matters: sage and thyme in the meat would fight the bunch of herbs going into the sauce.
- Frying fatA pound of sausage-meat will render some fat of its own, though the recipe assumes frying in hot fat to begin with. If the pan looks dry, top up with butter to about a tablespoon before stirring in the flour.
- YieldThree or four as written, as a main course with nothing but potatoes or a green vegetable.
Cassell's ran through many editions from the 1870s onward, and its game and pork chapters lean heavily on the pairing of chestnuts with fatty meat, a partnership that predates the book by centuries in both French and Italian cooking. The "Spanish chestnut" called for here is Castanea sativa, the European sweet chestnut, distinguished in nineteenth-century British markets from the inedible horse chestnut and from the smaller American species; much of the supply came in by ship in autumn. Selling sausage-meat loose by the pound, as the costing here assumes, was ordinary butcher's practice.