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Apples and Sausages
This dish comes from the French border of Belgium; it tastes better than you would think. Take a pound of beef sausages, and preferably use the small chipolata sausages. (What a delightful thing if the English would make other kinds of sausages as well as their beef and pork ones!) Fry then your sausages lightly in butter, look upon them as little beings for a few moments in purgatory before they are removed to heaven, among the apples. Keeping your sausages hot after they are fried, take a pound of brown pippin apples, pare them and core them. Cut them into neat rounds quarter of an inch thick, put them to cook in their liquor of the sausages (which you are keeping hot elsewhere), and add butter to moisten them. Let them simmer gently so as to keep their shape. Put the apple-rings in the center of the dish, place the sausages round them. This dish uses a good deal of butter, but you must not use anything else for frying.
A straightforward pan dish; the only real difficulty is keeping the apple rings intact. Read the point about the pan order first.
- The hinge: apples in the sausage fatThe apples cook in the buttery fat left behind, not in a fresh clean pan, and they must be moved as little as possible. Lay the rings flat in a single layer, spoon butter over them, and turn each one once with a thin spatula rather than tossing the pan.
- Chipolatas and "beef sausages"Chipolatas are thin, short fresh sausages in a narrow casing, sold widely in Britain and increasingly elsewhere; any small fresh sausage of about three-quarters of an inch in diameter works. "Beef sausages" here means an all-beef fresh sausage, not a cured or smoked one — nothing that has already been cooked.
- Fry lightly means finish themThe recipe's whimsy about purgatory notwithstanding, the sausages come out of the pan and stay out while the apples cook, so they must be cooked through before they are set aside: about 12-15 minutes over medium heat, turning, to an internal 160F. Hold them in a low oven, around 200F, rather than on the back of the stove.
- Brown pippinsAn old English apple name, probably of the russet type, and not to be found in shops now. Substitute any firm apple that holds its shape in the pan — Braeburn, Granny Smith, or a russet if your market has one. Avoid Bramley, which breaks down to purée, and avoid a soft eating apple, which will do the same.
- Quarter-inch roundsCore the apples with an apple corer before slicing so you get true rings; slicing first and coring afterwards breaks them. A pound of apples gives roughly 12-16 rings.
- Butter onlyThe instruction is not sentiment — the browned butter and sausage fat together are the sauce, and butter's milk solids give the apples their colour. Use unsalted so the reduced fat does not turn salty, and keep the heat below smoking point.
- Timing and yieldThe apple rings need roughly 6-10 minutes total, gentle, until a knife point slides in with slight resistance. A pound of sausages with a pound of apples serves three, or two generously.
The book places this dish on the French border of Belgium, where pork and apples have long shared a plate, and where the line between Belgian and French provincial cooking is mostly a matter of which side of it the cook was born. The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck, who gathered recipes from Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion of 1914; the proceeds went to relief work, and the aside about English sausages — the voice is not identified — is a polite complaint about the narrowness of the British butcher's counter, preserved in print. Chipolatas themselves are a case in point: the name is generally traced to the Italian cipollata, from cipolla, onion, by way of French cookery, and the word seems to have arrived in English mainly as a description of size rather than of any particular seasoning. Apples fried in the fat of the meat is peasant economy of the plainest kind — nothing is poured away, and the fruit's acidity does the work a sauce would otherwise have to do.