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Frankforts in Cream Sauce
Make a cream sauce of one and a half tablespoons each of butter and flour and one cup of milk. Season with pepper and salt. Skin four Frankfort sausages.
Cut into pieces about an inch long and bring them to the boiling point in the sauce. Stella A. Downing.
A plain white sauce with hot dogs in it, from the era when "cream sauce" meant milk thickened with a butter-and-flour roux. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes.
- The sauce is a basic white sauceMelt the 1 1/2 tablespoons butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two before adding the milk so the sauce does not taste pasty. Add the milk gradually, whisking, and simmer until it coats a spoon.
- Skinning the sausagesThe recipe's instruction to skin them suggests the frankfurters of the period came in casings firm enough to be worth removing. Modern supermarket franks are often skinless or carry a thin cellulose casing that has already been stripped; if yours have a casing, slit it lengthwise with a knife tip and peel.
- "Bring to the boiling point" means barelyThe frankfurters are already fully cooked, so this is only reheating. Hold the sauce just below a simmer for three or four minutes; a hard boil will split the sausages and can make the milk sauce break or catch on the pan bottom.
- Season after, not beforeFrankfurters are heavily salted and they give salt up to the sauce. Salt the sauce lightly at the roux stage and correct it once the sausages have heated through.
- YieldFour sausages and a cup of sauce serves two as a main dish or four as a small course. The recipe gives no accompaniment; toast, boiled rice or mashed potato would suit it.
- Worth addingA grating of nutmeg, a teaspoon of prepared mustard, or a spoonful of chopped parsley stirred in at the end all sit well with the period style and rescue the sauce from blandness.
Recipes like this one belong to the long American career of the white sauce, which had become the standard household vehicle for stretching a small amount of meat, fish or vegetable into a dish for a family. Frankfurters themselves arrived with German immigration in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time this collection was assembled they were cheap, cooked, keepable and available in most city markets, which made them exactly the kind of ingredient a housekeeping magazine liked to promote. The attribution to Stella A. Downing marks it as a reader contribution, and the result is a book full of short, thrifty, unfussy formulas of precisely this kind rather than the elaborate set pieces of the professional cookery writers.