Home › French Recipes › Sausage with Peas
Sausage with Peas
8 pork sausages
½ cup peas
1 tablespoon flour
4 eggs
½ cup water
Cut the sausages in pieces about an inch long, and brown them in the frying-pan. When well browned, remove from the pan, pour off all the fat except one tablespoon, add to it the flour, and when browned, add the water. When the sauce is thick, put in the pieces of sausage, the peas, and beaten eggs. Pour into a baking-dish and bake in a slow oven until the eggs are set.
A sausage-and-egg gratin built on a small brown roux gravy. The whole dish turns on the eggs, which are custard here, not scrambled egg.
- Slow ovenThe recipe gives no number; take it as somewhere around 300F. The eggs set as a custard, and too hot an oven will curdle them and leave weeping liquid. Reckon on roughly half an hour in a shallow dish; the center should be just barely firm.
- The peasThe recipe gives the peas no cooking time of their own, so they were presumably already cooked, or canned. Frozen peas, thawed, are the practical equivalent; they need no precooking since they will spend the whole bake in the oven.
- SausagesEight links is somewhere between half a pound and a pound, depending on their size. Avoid heavily seasoned Italian sausage or breakfast sausage with maple; the dish is meant to taste of pork and browned flour.
- Browning the flourOne tablespoon of flour in one tablespoon of fat is a tight roux. Stir it over moderate heat until it smells nutty and goes the color of weak coffee before the water goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- Sauce consistencyThe recipe says to wait until the sauce is thick, but a half cup of water on a single tablespoon of flour will only ever give a light gravy; the beaten eggs are what set the dish. If it looks too loose to hold together, resist adding more flour.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none, as was common when salt and pepper were assumed. Season the sauce before the eggs go in, and taste it: the sausage fat carries most of the salt.
- DonenessBake until a knife slid into the center comes out clean and the surface no longer trembles as a liquid. If you use a thermometer, 170F at the center is set through.
- YieldServes two generously or three modestly, with bread. It is a supper dish rather than a first course.
The method is thrifty in a familiar way: a spoonful of fat saved, a tablespoon of flour browned in it, and eggs used to bind a small amount of meat into a full dish. The technique is that of a plain *sauce brune* poured over odds and ends and set with egg. Butterick published this alongside its dress patterns, aimed at women running households without staff, and the appeal of a recipe like this was arithmetic: eight sausages and four eggs feeding a family that would otherwise need a joint. The half cup of peas belongs to the same economy.