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Stewed Sausages with Cabbage
Procure a medium-sized white cabbage, remove all the green leaves, and cut it into quarters, removing the center stalks. Wash thoroughly in cold water, drain well, cut them into small pieces, put them into boiling salted water for five minutes. Remove it to cold water to cool moderately, take out the pieces of cabbage, drain in a colander and put into a saucepan with one gill of fat from soup stock or one ounce of butter. Season with a pinch of salt and one-half pinch of pepper and a whole medium-sized onion and a carrot cut into quarters. Put on the cover of the saucepan, set it on a moderate fire and cook for half an hour. Take twelve sausages, prick them with a fork, add them to the cabbage and allow all to cook together for twelve minutes. Dress the cabbage on a hot dish and arrange the sausages and carrot on top. Serve very hot.
A plain braise of blanched cabbage finished with sausages, written for a kitchen with stockpots always going. Two things need translating: the fat measure and the doneness of the sausages.
- One gill of fatA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. That is a great deal of skimmed stock fat for one cabbage; the alternative given, one ounce of butter (2 tablespoons), is closer to what most cooks will want. Somewhere between the two — say 3 tablespoons of bacon fat, duck fat or butter — gives the richness intended without pooling.
- Fat from soup stockA professional kitchen with stock on hand would have skimmed the fat from it. At home, use rendered bacon fat, duck fat, or butter. Skimmed fat from a homemade stock works if you have it and has more flavour than butter.
- A moderate fireOn a modern burner this means low, with the lid on — a bare simmer where the cabbage sweats in its own moisture rather than frying. Check once or twice in the half hour and add a spoonful of water if the pan runs dry.
- The blanching is not optionalFive minutes in boiling salted water and a cold-water shock takes the sulphurous edge off the cabbage and sets its colour. Skipping it gives a noticeably harsher, more strongly smelling dish after the long covered cook.
- Twelve minutes for the sausagesThat timing suits small, thin breakfast-size links. Modern fresh pork sausages are usually thicker and should reach 160F/71C at the centre, which may take 15-20 minutes buried in cabbage. Pricking them, as instructed, lets fat into the cabbage but also dries the sausage, so prick once or twice, not all over.
- The onion and carrotBoth go in whole or in quarters as aromatics. Only the carrot is called back for the plate; the recipe says nothing about the onion, so discard it or serve it separately. Quartering the carrot lengthwise gives pieces that hold their shape for thirty minutes.
- Seasoning"A pinch" and "half a pinch" are left to the cook's judgment. If you want a starting figure, try a scant half teaspoon of salt and an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper, then taste at the end — stock fat and sausages both bring their own salt.
- YieldTwelve small sausages and one medium cabbage feed four as a main course. A splash of white wine or cider vinegar stirred in at the end is not in the original but cuts the fat.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, but his 1896 Cook Book collected the house repertoire, and that repertoire was Franco-German in the way New York hotel cooking of the 1890s generally was. This dish is essentially chou braisé with sausages — the same logic as an Alsatian choucroute garnie, but with fresh cabbage instead of sauerkraut, which makes it milder and quicker. The instruction to cook it in skimmed stock fat is a mark of a professional kitchen: nothing was wasted, and the fat lifted off the day's consommé was a working ingredient with a flavour of its own. Blanching and refreshing cabbage before braising it is a French technique that was already old when Oscar wrote it down, and it remains the reason this simple dish tastes cleaner than the sum of its parts.