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Remains of Sausage
If you have a few inches of a big sausage cut it into as thick slices as you can--fry them and lay them in a circle on a dish with a poached egg on each. Little dinner breads are good when soaked in milk, stuffed with sausage meat, and fried. It can be used to stuff cucumber, or eggplants, but you should then crumble up the meat and bind it with the yolk of a raw egg. Shoulder of Lamb a la Belge Braise your shoulder of lamb; that is, put it in a closely covered stewpan, in a good brown sauce or gravy with the vegetables, to be served with it. It is the lid being closed that makes the meat take some flavor from the vegetables. To do it in the Belgian way, take some good white turnips, wash them and scrape them, put small ones in whole, large ones cut in half. Take some small cabbages, trim off without leaves, cut them in half, remove the stalk, make a hollow in the center and fill it with forcemeat of any kind; but sausage meat is good. Place the stuffed cabbages round the meat to cook gently at the same time.
Fillet of Beef a la Brabanconne Take a whole fillet of beef, trim it neatly and set it in a braising pan to cook very slowly in some good brown sauce to which you have added a pint of stock. Put in neatly shaped carrots and turnips and some balls made of mashed potato already fried. Keep hot in two sauceboats a puree of Brussels sprouts and a puree of onions. These are prepared by cooking the vegetables in water, then chopping fine, and rubbing through a sieve with cream, or with a little good milk, pepper, and salt. To serve the fillet, lay it on a dish with the carrots and turnip, potato cakes round; pour over it the rest of the brown sauce from the pan; then add in heaps the onion puree and the sprouts puree.
Three linked entries: a page of uses for leftover sausage, then two braises. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to make brown sauce and poach an egg, so the useful work here is filling in quantities, temperatures and the one place where modern practice flatly disagrees.
- Braising temperatureA "closely covered stewpan" cooking "gently" means a bare simmer. The book names no oven and no temperature, and a stewpan implies the stovetop: use the lowest steady flame, or, if you move it to the oven, a low setting that just holds a bare simmer. The book gives no weight or time either; a shoulder of around 3-4 lb will likely want something in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 hours to become tender.
- The fillet of beef is the exceptionBraising a whole beef fillet very slowly, as written, will give you grey, dry meat: tenderloin has almost no collagen to convert and nothing to gain from long moist heat. If you want the Brabançonne garnish, roast or sear the fillet to rare and build the sauce and vegetables separately.
- Brown sauceThis means espagnole or a well-reduced meat gravy, not gravy from a packet. The book was compiled in Britain, so the pint is most likely an imperial pint of 20 fl oz; a US pint of 16 fl oz would serve equally well here, since it is only being added to a braise.
- Little dinner breadsSmall dinner rolls. Soak them briefly in milk, squeeze lightly so they hold together, split and fill with sausage meat, then shallow-fry. Stale rolls hold up far better than fresh.
- Forcemeat and the raw yolkSausage meat crumbled and bound with a raw yolk is a straightforward farce; it is cooked through inside the cabbage or the vegetable, so the raw egg is not a concern. Cook stuffed cabbage or eggplant until the filling reaches 160F.
- Small cabbages"Trim off without leaves" means strip the outer leaves. Use small green or Savoy cabbages, not Brussels sprouts — those appear separately in the fillet recipe.
- The puréesBoiled sprouts and boiled onions pushed through a sieve with cream reduce to something loose; drain the vegetables very well first and reduce the purée in a pan if it slackens. A food mill or blender does the sieving in seconds.
- YieldA shoulder of lamb serves 4-6; a whole trimmed fillet of beef, 6-8. The sausage suggestions are for one or two people using up an end of charcuterie.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War, its recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled the German occupation of 1914, and sold in aid of relief work. That origin explains the shape of this page: it opens not with a dish but with what to do with a few inches of leftover sausage, and it treats forcemeat as something to be stretched into cabbages and cucumbers. The two braises that follow are restaurant-grade bourgeois cooking — à la brabançonne is the classical French garnish name for Brussels sprouts and potato, Brabant being the province around Brussels — and the jump from scraps to whole fillet of beef within a single page is characteristic of the book, which was compiled from the memories of cooks who had kept very different kitchens before they lost them. The braising note, that the closed lid is what makes the meat take flavour from the vegetables, is the sort of remark a working cook makes rather than a writer.