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Fried Sausage Meat
Turn some sausage meat out of the skins and divide and roll it into small balls; wrap each ball in a thin rasher of bacon and pass a skewer through to keep it on. Put them in a fryingpan with a little butter and fry lightly. When cooked lay them on a hot dish that has been spread with a folded napkin, or a fancy dish-paper, and garnish with fried parsley and small croutons of fried bread. Serve immediately.
A simple chafing-dish savoury: bulk sausage rolled into balls, wrapped in bacon, skewered and pan-fried. The only real technique is getting the pork cooked through without burning the bacon.
- The hinge: heat controlBacon fat and butter both brown fast, while a 1-inch sausage ball needs 8-10 minutes to reach 160F at the centre. Keep the pan at a steady medium and turn the skewers often rather than searing hard at the start.
- Sausage meat"Turn some sausage meat out of the skins" suggests the meat was bought as links; buy plain bulk breakfast sausage and skip that step; about 1 lb makes 20 to 24 small balls.
- Rasher, thinA rasher is one slice. Use standard thin-cut bacon, not thick-cut, which will not have rendered by the time the pork is done. Stretch each slice slightly with the back of a knife so it wraps snugly.
- SkewersWooden cocktail picks work, but soak them or expect scorching; short metal skewers are easier to turn.
- Butter is barely neededThe bacon renders enough fat within a minute or two. A teaspoon of butter to start the pan is plenty, and pour off the excess as it accumulates or the balls will deep-fry unevenly.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs, dry as you can get them, dropped into hot fat for 20 to 30 seconds until they stop spitting and turn crisp and dark green. Wet parsley in hot fat spatters violently.
- The napkinThe folded napkin or dish-paper is there to absorb fat, in the era before paper towels. A rack over a warm plate does the job better if the presentation does not matter.
- YieldUnstated, as usual in this book. A pound of sausage with a half-pound of bacon serves six to eight as an appetiser, or four as a light supper dish.
Bacon-wrapped sausage in one form or another is old hotel-kitchen shorthand for a savoury: the small hot bite served at the end of a formal English or Anglo-American dinner, after the sweet and before dessert, and it survives in the British "pigs in blankets" and the American cocktail sausage. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and much of it reads like a working reference for a large brigade rather than a book for home cooks; entries are brief because the reader was assumed to know the method already. The instruction to serve on a folded napkin or a "fancy dish-paper" is the giveaway that this belonged to restaurant service, where a fried item had to arrive at the table without a slick of grease pooling under it.