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Country Sausage
Prepare a sausage forcemeat and divide it into small portions, flour the hands and roll it into balls. Put some butter in a fryingpan and when it is hot fry the balls, a few at a time, adding more butter when required. Turn them constantly and when equally browned drain them, put them on a hot dish, garnish with fried parsley, and serve.
A cross-reference recipe of the kind Oscar's book is full of: it assumes you already have a sausage forcemeat made up elsewhere in the volume. Everything here hangs on cooking the balls through without scorching the butter.
- What the forcemeat isA period sausage forcemeat is simply ground fresh pork, roughly two parts lean to one part fat, seasoned with salt, pepper, sage, and often a little thyme, mace or nutmeg. Bulk breakfast sausage from a butcher is the direct modern equivalent; if you grind your own, do not go leaner than about 25 percent fat or the balls turn dry and crumbly.
- Size and yieldThe recipe gives no weight. If you take "small portions" as about an ounce each, rolled to roughly an inch and a half, a pound of forcemeat gives sixteen or so balls, enough for four as a breakfast or garnish portion.
- Cook through, not just brownThe instruction stops at "equally browned," which on a hot pan can happen well before the centre is done. Fresh pork needs 160F at the middle; balls this size take roughly 10 to 12 minutes over medium heat, and lowering the flame after the first colour takes hold is the practical way to get there.
- Butter will burnWhole butter over the heat needed to brown sausage goes past nut-brown quickly, particularly as fat renders out of the pork and the pan solids accumulate. The recipe only says to add more butter as required; wiping the pan or changing the butter between batches, or using clarified butter, which holds up far better, will keep it from blackening.
- Turn constantly means itRound balls colour on one facet at a time. Keep them rolling with a spoon or by shaking the pan so they take an even shell; a crowded pan steams instead of browning, so a few at a time is not padding.
- Flouring the handsThis is only to stop the meat sticking while rolling. Use the lightest dusting; flour worked into the surface gives a pasty crust rather than a crisp one. Chilling the forcemeat first does more good than extra flour.
- Fried parsleyFlat or curly parsley, well dried, dropped into fat at about 350F for 20 to 30 seconds until it stops bubbling and turns bright and brittle. Wet parsley will spit violently, so dry it thoroughly and stand back as it goes in.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and its structure shows it: dozens of entries like this one are short instructions that lean on a base preparation given elsewhere, because the cooks reading them already had forcemeats standing by. "Country sausage" is left undefined in the recipe itself, though it is often taken to mean a loose fresh pork mixture rather than anything cased or cured, shaped here into balls so it could travel from range to plate. The fried parsley finish was a common enough flourish in hotel and restaurant service, cheap green that added crispness and made a brown plate look composed; it disappeared from most kitchens along with the deep pans of fat that made it effortless.