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Baked Sausages
Place twelve sausages on a baking dish, prick them a little, and separate them by twelve slices of bread cut the same length as the sausages. Bake in the oven for twelve minutes, basting them occasionally with their own liquor, and serve on a metal dish with one-half pint of hot Madeira sauce in a sauceboat.
A hotel breakfast or supper dish that assumes fresh butcher's sausages of a known size and an oven the cook knew by feel. Two things need attention: the temperature, which is not given, and the twelve minutes, which is not enough for raw pork today.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given because none was expected. A hot oven of roughly 400-425F suits this: enough to colour the sausages and crisp the bread without the fat scorching.
- The twelve minutesTwelve minutes will not bring raw pork sausages to a safe internal 160F unless they are very slim. Cook to temperature, not to the clock; thicker links typically need 20-25 minutes with a turn partway through.
- PrickingOscar wants the fat released to baste the bread. Modern practice generally leaves sausages whole so they stay juicy, so prick sparingly or not at all if your sausages are lean and you are willing to add a little butter to the pan instead.
- The breadThe recipe uses the slices structurally, cut the length of the sausages to separate them; basted with the rendered fat they crisp underneath. A firm white loaf cut about half an inch thick works well, and stale bread holds up better than fresh.
- Madeira sauceIn this kitchen that means a brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira, not wine thickened on its own. A good jarred or homemade demi-glace reduced with a couple of tablespoons of dry Madeira gets you there.
- Half a pintOne cup in American measure, which is generous for twelve sausages. Half that is plenty unless the sauceboat is going round a table of six.
- Serving"A metal dish" most likely means a silver or metal platter, the sort of vessel that holds heat while the food travels from kitchen to table. Any warmed serving dish does the same job. No yield is given; twelve sausages would plausibly serve four to six.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book reads as a hotel working repertoire set down in print — several thousand short entries with almost no yields or temperatures, written for cooks who already knew the house style. A dish like this would suit the hotel's breakfast and after-theatre supper trade, where things had to be assembled quickly from what was already at hand: links from the butcher, day-old bread, and brown sauce from the stove. The Madeira finish points to restaurant rather than domestic cooking; fortified wine sauces were a standard professional way of lifting an inexpensive protein, and Madeira remained a fixture of American fine dining well into the twentieth century.