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Deviled Sausages
Steam some pork sausages for an hour, then leave them until cold. Cut some pieces of bread about two inches in length and one and one-half inches wide and fry them in butter to a pale golden color. Drain them and mask them with a thin coating of curry paste. Skin the sausages and cut them lengthwise into thin slices, then cut each slice into halves, place half a slice of sausage on each piece of bread and spread a little mango chutney over them. Put them in the oven with a cover over and leave until hot. Spread an ornamental dish-paper over a hot dish, place the sausages on it, garnish them with slices of lemon and fried parsley, and serve.
A savoury of the sort served at the end of an Edwardian dinner, and easily repurposed as a canapé. Nothing here is difficult; the details that trip people up are the steaming time and the fact that the bread does all the structural work.
- Steaming timeAn hour of steaming suits the coarse, thick-cased sausages of 1896; modern links need 20-25 minutes, or until the centre reaches 160F. Beyond that the fat renders out and the meat turns dry and crumbly, which makes the thin lengthwise slices impossible to cut.
- Cool them completelyThe instruction to leave the sausages until cold is not optional. Warm sausage will not slice cleanly lengthwise into thin sheets, and the skin peels away far more easily once the fat has set. Chilling in the refrigerator is faster and works as well.
- Curry pasteIn this period curry paste meant a thick, oily commercial preparation of ground spice, oil and vinegar, sold by firms such as Crosse & Blackwell; some versions also contained dried shrimp or anchovy. A jarred Madras or Bengal-style curry paste is the closest current equivalent. Use it thinly; it is meant as a seasoning film, not a layer.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the dish only needs reheating. An oven of about 350F for 5-8 minutes, covered, is enough. The cover keeps the fried bread from drying out and hardening.
- Frying the croûtesFrying the croûtes -- Cut the bread from a firm white loaf, slightly stale. The recipe says butter; clarified butter or a butter-oil mix is more forgiving, since whole butter can brown and burn before the bread has coloured evenly. Drain on paper; a greasy base ruins the finish.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs of flat or curly parsley, patted bone dry, dropped into 350F fat for about 15 seconds until they stop spitting and turn brittle-bright. Wet parsley will erupt in the pan.
- Dish-paperAn ornamental dish-paper is a pierced or lace-cut paper doily laid on the serving platter to absorb residual fat. A folded napkin or a plain paper doily does the same job; it is presentation, not cooking.
- YieldThe original gives no numbers. A sausage sliced lengthwise, with each slice halved, will cover several of the small pieces of bread; reckon on roughly one sausage per person as a savoury, with bread cut to match, more if serving with drinks.
This belongs to the British savoury course, which is generally understood to have reached the Waldorf by way of London dining: a small, hot, sharply seasoned mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert, intended to settle the palate for port. Devilled dishes — anything treated with mustard, cayenne, curry or chutney — were the backbone of that course, and the word devil had been applied to fiercely spiced grilled and reheated food in English kitchens since at least the early nineteenth century. Curry paste and mango chutney reaching a New York hotel kitchen by the 1890s reflects how thoroughly the Anglo-Indian pantry had been commercialised and exported; both were sold in bottles and jars by British firms and carried far beyond any Indian context. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, compiled his book from the working repertoire of that establishment, which is why an English club savoury sits comfortably among the French entrées.