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Sausage and Potatoes
Roll some cooked sausage meat in mashed potatoes, making a roll for each person. Brush the potatoes over with milk and put them to bake till nicely browned. Decorate with gherkins on each roll of butter.
A wartime economy dish written in shorthand: cooked sausage meat encased in mashed potato and browned in the oven. The instructions assume you already know what a potato croquette looks like.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake at 400-425F, high enough to brown and crisp the surface before the potato dries out — roughly 20-25 minutes.
- "Cooked sausage meat"Bulk sausage meat, fried or poached and drained, not raw. Skinned links work equally well. Since the filling is already cooked, the oven stage is about colour, not doneness, though the centre should still reach steaming hot.
- The mashed potato must be stiffThis is the hinge. Loose, buttery mash will slump in the oven. Use floury potatoes, mash dry, and let the mixture cool before shaping; an egg yolk worked into the potato helps it hold, as it does in a croquette.
- Brushing with milkMilk gives a soft, pale gold surface. Beaten egg or egg mixed with milk browns considerably more, which is what "nicely browned" implies to a modern eye.
- The garbled last line"Decorate with gherkins on each roll of butter" reads as a garble; "roll of butter" was a common period term for a shaped pat, so the intended sense is probably a pat of butter and a gherkin on each roll. Set both on top as the rolls come out.
- YieldOne roll per person, as stated. Figure about 6 oz potato and 3 oz sausage meat each; four servings from 1.5 lb potatoes and 12 oz sausage.
- ServingSharp pickles are the whole point of the garnish — the dish is rich and starchy and wants acid. A green salad or braised red cabbage rounds it out.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes gathered among Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief funds. That origin may explain the terseness of pages like this one: the recipes were most likely remembered and dictated rather than copied out of a manuscript, and much was left to the cook's judgement. It also explains the thrift. Sausage wrapped in potato stretches a small amount of meat across a household, and the pairing of pork with potato and pickled gherkin is thoroughly Flemish he>stoemp and the pickle jar that sits beside almost every Belgian plate of fried food.