Sausages
Cut apart a string of sausages. Pierce each sausage several times with a carving fork. Put in frying-pan, cover with boiling water, and cook fifteen minutes; drain, return to frying-pan, and fry until well browned. Serve with fried apples. Sausages are often broiled same as bacon and apples baked in pan under them.
This is a method rather than a formula: fresh pork links, parboiled and then browned. Two details are worth adjusting.
- Skip the piercingPuncturing the casings lets fat and juices escape, giving drier sausage and a spitting pan. It was probably done to stop casings bursting over fierce coal heat; on a modern burner, moderate heat and the water bath do that job.
- Fifteen minutes is longSausages of the period were packed in natural casings and were often thicker and more coarsely ground than today's. Standard supermarket breakfast links need only 5-8 minutes of gentle simmering before browning; a thick bratwurst-sized link is closer to the original 15.
- Cook to temperatureFresh pork sausage is done at 160F on an instant-read thermometer inserted lengthwise. The browning stage is for color and crust, not for cooking through.
- "Cover with boiling water"Enough to submerge the links in the frying pan, roughly a cup or two. Drain and dry the pan completely before returning them, or they will steam rather than brown.
- A string of sausagesButchers sold links still joined in a continuous casing, hence "cut apart." Pre-separated links need no cutting.
- Broiling, 1896 styleBroiling, period style -- Broiling of this kind was generally done on a wire broiler held over live coals, turned by hand. Under a modern overhead broiler set to high, put the pan of apple slices on a lower rack so the rendered fat drips onto them; turn the sausages once.
- Fried applesFirm tart apples, cored and cut in rings about a third of an inch thick, fried in some of the sausage fat until browned and tender. A little sugar helps them caramelize.
- YieldA pound of links serves three to four at breakfast.
Fannie Farmer's book treats sausage as a raw material the reader buys rather than makes, which marks the moment: by the 1890s urban Boston households seem generally to have bought fresh pork sausage from a butcher or in bulk by the pound, while farm kitchens a generation earlier are often said to have ground and stuffed their own after the autumn hog killing. The parboil-then-brown method belongs to that older, fattier, more coarsely ground sausage and to the uneven heat of a coal range, where a wet start was presumably meant to help the interior cook before the outside charred. Pairing pork with fried or baked apples is long-standing in both English and German-American cooking, and the instruction to bake the apples in the pan beneath broiling sausages is simple thrift: the fat that would otherwise be lost seasons the fruit.