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Chicken or Turkey Sausage
Take the skin off a large fowl by first cutting down the back and cutting around the joints to the skin as nearly whole as possible. Cut all the meat of the fowl from the carcass without bone or gristle, chop it raw, like sausage meat, and then pound it with masher in the chopping bowl. Weigh it, and take half as much fat bacon, chop and pound it likewise. Mix the two pastes together, season like sausage-meat with pepper sage and salt. Roll up in the skin of the fowl and then in a napkin, and boil the sausage in seasoned broth, with the bones of the fowl in it, for an hour. When done put it on a dish to cool in the napkin it was boiled in, and another dish or other weight on top to give it an even shape. Slice cold and ornament with jelly and parsley.
This is a galantine under a plainer name: boned fowl, ground with pork fat, packed back into its own skin and poached. The whole thing depends on the skin coming off in one sheet, so slow down at the start.
- Skinning the birdCut down the backbone and work the skin off with your fingers and the knife tip only where it clings, at the wings, drumsticks and along the keel. A 4-5 lb chicken gives a manageable sheet; a "large fowl" of this period would more often have been an older stewing hen, tougher meat but a sturdier skin.
- Fat baconIn period usage this generally meant fat salt pork or fat side meat, not modern cured smoked breakfast bacon. Fresh pork fat -- fatback, or the fat trimmed from a pork shoulder -- is the easiest modern stand-in. Cured smoked bacon will dominate the seasoning and turn the forcemeat pink and salty.
- Chopping and poundingA food processor does both steps. Pulse the chicken and the pork fat separately, keeping everything near freezing, then combine briefly. Overworking warm fat breaks the emulsion and the sliced galantine will be crumbly and weeping.
- Half as much fatBy weight, so 1 lb of meat to 8 oz of pork fat. That ratio looks high, but it is what makes the loaf sliceable cold rather than dry and grainy.
- SeasoningSeason "like sausage-meat" means roughly 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons salt per pound of total mixture, plus pepper and dried sage. Poach a teaspoon of the mixture in water and taste it before you commit -- raw forcemeat tastes flat and underseasoned.
- The napkinUse muslin or a double layer of cheesecloth, not a modern terrycloth or printed tea towel. Roll the stuffed skin into a tight cylinder, tie the ends like a cracker and truss along the length at intervals so it holds shape.
- Poaching temperature and donenessKeep the broth at a bare shiver, 175-180F. A rolling boil bursts the skin and renders the fat out. One hour suits a roll about 3 inches thick; go by a thermometer pushed into the centre, which needs to read 165F.
- Pressing and keepingWeight it while still wrapped and chill overnight -- it slices badly warm. Serve within three or four days, and note the original ornament of "jelly" is aspic made by reducing and clarifying the poaching broth, which will set on its own from the bones.
- YieldA 5 lb bird yields a roll serving eight to ten as a cold course, cut in slices about 1/4 inch thick.
Under its plain American name this is a galantine, a French cold-larder preparation in which a bird is boned, its flesh worked into a forcemeat with pork fat, and the whole returned to the skin to be poached and pressed -- the word is generally traced to old French galantine/galatine, connected to jelly. The economy is the point: skin, meat, and bones of a single fowl all get used, the bones going into the poaching broth that later sets as the jelly used to glaze the slices. It is also a dish built for a period without reliable refrigeration, where a fat-rich roll pressed under weight would keep in a cool larder and could be sliced to order for days.