Sausages
Buy the best. Pierce several times with skewer. Cook in hot frying pan in hot oven, fifteen to twenty minutes. Many prefer to cover sausages with boiling water after piercing and boil twenty minutes, then brown in frying pan on top of range. Always drain on brown paper before serving. Serve around a mound of mashed browned potatoes.
A terse turn-of-the-century note on cooking fresh pork sausages, written when links were fattier, coarser and far less uniform than what comes off a supermarket shelf today. Two of its instructions are worth arguing with.
- Skip the piercingPricking sausages was standard advice when casings were natural, hand-filled and prone to bursting over fierce heat. With modern links and moderate heat, piercing simply lets rendered fat and juices escape, leaving the interior dry. Cook them intact and control the temperature instead.
- "Hot oven"In the vocabulary of this period a hot oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. Fifteen to twenty minutes at that heat suits a thick link; thinner breakfast sausages will likely be done sooner.
- Hot frying pan in hot ovenThis is the pan-in-oven method: heat a heavy skillet, cast iron ideally, lay the sausages in it and transfer the whole thing to the oven. It gives contact browning underneath and even cooking through, and it still works.
- The twenty-minute boilBoiling for twenty minutes overcooks most modern sausages badly and washes flavour into the water. If you want the parboil-then-brown approach, poach gently below a simmer for eight to ten minutes, then finish in the pan.
- DonenessFresh pork sausage should reach 160F at the centre. Colour is unreliable, since cured or nitrite-containing mixtures stay pink even when fully cooked.
- Brown paperUnprinted butcher or grocery paper was the standard draining surface before paper towels. A wire rack set over a tray does the job better and keeps the browned surface crisp.
- Mashed browned potatoesThe recipe gives no method; it presumably means mashed potato piled into a mound and browned under high heat. A few minutes under the broiler will give the sort of crust the name implies.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. As a rough guide, three or four links per person as a main course, two alongside eggs at breakfast.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer whose interest in a general cookbook was to put its cocoa and baking chocolate into American kitchens. That commercial origin explains the book's shape: the confectionery and dessert chapters are expansive and detailed, while the meat chapter runs to briskly practical notes like this one, aimed at a cook who already knows what a sausage is and needs only a method. The instruction to buy the best is not filler. Fresh sausage in 1907 was bought from a butcher or a market stall, varied enormously in fat, filler and freshness, and had a reputation for concealing whatever the shop needed to move; the Pure Food and Drug Act had passed only the year before, and food adulteration was very much in the public mind. Sausages with mashed potato is often said to be an English inheritance, though the line is hard to trace, and the arrangement of meat around a central mound may reflect a habit of serving composed platters rather than plating each portion separately.