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Sausages, with Cress and Pickles
Cook some sausages a nice brown colour; glaze them, and serve on a hot dish with toast under them. Put some water-cress round, plainly dressed with a little oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper, and send sweet pickles to table. Cost, according to kind of sausages used.
A supper or breakfast dish that is really an assembly job: the only cooking is the sausages, and the only technique worth attention is the glaze.
- What "glaze" means hereNot sugar. Victorian glaze is meat glaze — strong stock reduced to a syrup that sets to a shine — brushed over the browned sausages at the last moment. Reduced beef or veal stock, or a spoonful of demi-glace thinned with the pan juices, does the same thing.
- Cook them through, not just brownThe instruction gives colour as the only cue. Pork sausages want an internal temperature of 160F/71C; chicken or turkey ones 165F/74C. Twelve to fifteen minutes in a heavy pan over medium heat, turned often, or 20 minutes at 400F, gets there without splitting the skins.
- The sausages the book meansBritish breakfast sausages of the period were generally coarse pork, often with a proportion of rusk or breadcrumb, and mildly seasoned with mace, sage or nutmeg. They brown gently and take a glaze well. Highly spiced Italian or smoked sausages will fight the watercress and the pickles.
- Toast under themThe toast is a sop for the fat and glaze, so cut it thick and toast it dry rather than buttering it. Trim the slices to sit under the sausages and warm the dish, or the toast goes limp before it reaches the table.
- Dressing the cress"Plainly dressed" means the lightest possible coating — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, a few spoonfuls in total for a bunch of watercress, tossed at the moment of serving. Dress it early and it collapses.
- Sweet picklesHere this most likely means sweet-spiced fruit pickles — pickled peaches, damsons, pears or walnuts in vinegar and sugar — rather than American-style sweet cucumber chips. Any sharp-sweet fruit chutney or pickled fruit stands in acceptably.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon two to three sausages and a slice of toast per person, with a good handful of cress each.
The closing note, "cost, according to kind of sausages used," is the dictionary's standard shrug when the price depends entirely on the butcher, and sausages served a double duty as breakfast and as a cheap late supper. The watercress is not decoration but the point of contrast: cress was one of the cheapest greens in Victorian Britain, grown in beds along the chalk streams of Hampshire and Kent and carried into London by early train to be hawked in bunches through the streets at dawn, so a peppery salad beside fatty meat cost the household almost nothing. Sweet pickled fruit did the same job from the store cupboard, and the combination of rich meat, dry toast, sharp leaves and sweet vinegar is a very English piece of plate arithmetic.