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Veal Sausages
Chop two pounds or so of veal very fine, carefully removing from it all skin and sinew, mix with it one pound of finely-chopped beef suet, and season well with salt, pepper, chopped parsley, thyme and marjoram. Place the mixture in well-cleaned skins and tie them at intervals with twine.
A plain fresh sausage: no cure, no binder, no liquid. Everything depends on keeping the meat and fat cold and on cooking the links through, since the original stops at the point of filling.
- The hinge: keep everything coldVeal is lean and suet is hard, and both must be near-frozen when they meet the grinder or knife. If the fat smears at room temperature the sausage cooks out greasy and crumbly instead of holding together.
- Season by weightOscar gives no quantities. For 3 lb of total mixture use about 1 tablespoon fine salt (roughly 1.5 percent by weight), 1.5 teaspoons white pepper, and 2 tablespoons chopped parsley with a teaspoon each of thyme and marjoram, minced fine. Fry a teaspoon of the mix and taste before filling any casings.
- Beef suetSuet is the hard kidney fat, and a butcher will still order it. It is drier and more waxy than pork fat. The recipe's proportion is a full third of the mixture. Pork back fat or fatty shoulder gives a juicier link if you are not bound to the original.
- "Well-cleaned skins"Natural hog casings sold in salt need soaking 30 minutes in warm water and flushing through before use. Sheep casings would suit this size of sausage, though the recipe gives no indication of diameter.
- Tied at intervals, not twistedThe recipe links with twine rather than by twisting. Do not overstuff, or the casing splits when the fat expands.
- Cooking is left out entirelyThese are raw. Poach the links gently at about 175F for 10 minutes, then brown them in a pan, or simply fry over moderate heat, turning, for 12 to 15 minutes. Veal carries the same requirement as any ground meat: 160F at the centre.
- Yield and keepingThree pounds of mixture makes roughly 18 to 20 sausages of 2.5 oz. Uncured fresh sausage keeps two days refrigerated at most; freeze what is not cooked the same day.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, catches New York hotel cooking at a moment when its kitchens drew heavily on German-speaking Europe — the author himself was Swiss. A veal sausage bound with nothing but its own fat and green herbs sits closer to that tradition than to the French repertoire: it is of a family with the Bavarian Weisswurst and the Swiss Kalbsbratwurst, both of which are fresh, pale, unsmoked and eaten within a day or two of making. What is telling is how little the recipe explains. It assumes a cook with a butcher's block, a supply of prepared casings and enough judgment to salt three pounds of meat by feel, which is a fair portrait of who these directions were written for.