No. 1805

Sausages—Flat—with Tomato Soubise Sauce

Saucisses Plates a la Sauce Tomate Soubise

Roll some sausage meat into four ounce balls and wrap up in "crepinette" or caul fat; shape them into slightly lengthened flat pieces. There can be some parsley, tarragon or other herbs added to the sausage meat according to taste. Dip them in melted butter, then roll in bread-crumbs, and broil over a slow fire, afterward dress on a puree of tomatoes (No. 730), mingled with soubise sauce (No. 543).

← No. 1804 Sausages with Cream Potatoes, Baked Pork No. 1806 Sausages with Truffles →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is Ranhofer's crépinette: seasoned sausage meat wrapped in caul fat, crumbed and grilled. The recipe assumes you have his tomato purée and soubise on hand, and it assumes a charcoal broiler you can control by moving the grid.

Caul fat"Crepinette" here means the lacy membrane from around a pig's stomach, ordered from a butcher and usually sold frozen or salted. Soak it in tepid water with a splash of vinegar until it unfolds, then pat dry; it should be stretched thin over the patty so it melts away and leaves a burnished skin rather than a rubbery sheet.
Four-ounce ballsEach crepinette is about 115 g of sausage meat, flattened to an oval roughly the thickness of a finger. Two per person makes a portion; the recipe specifies no quantity of meat and no yield, so the number served is up to the cook.
Sausage meatChair a saucisse was generally coarsely ground pork shoulder with a good proportion of fat, though Ranhofer specifies nothing here. Bulk breakfast sausage is generally too sweet and too finely worked; ground pork shoulder seasoned with salt, pepper and the herbs Ranhofer suggests is closer to intent.
Slow fireA slow charcoal fire means moderate heat, the grid set well clear of the coals; the book gives no temperature. Crumbed caul over a hot grill scorches before the centre sets. Cook to 160F internal, about 12-15 minutes with one turn.
The hinge: butter then crumbs, over the caulDip and crumb after wrapping, not before. The butter glues the crumbs to the membrane and the melting fat bastes them; crumbing the bare meat first gives you a soggy layer under the caul.
SoubiseSoubise is an onion sauce: onions sweated in butter without colour, cooked soft, sieved and bound (Ranhofer's version is thickened in the bechamel manner). Ranhofer gives no proportions for the mingling; in roughly equal parts with the tomato puree it gives a pale coral sauce, sweet against the salt of the sausage.
Tomato puréeHis No. 730 is a cooked, sieved, seasoned tomato sauce, not the concentrated paste sold in tubes today. A thick, well-reduced passata with a little stock and butter stands in.
If you cannot get caulThe crépinettes can be formed as bare patties and crumbed directly, but expect them to dry faster and to lose the glossy lacquered surface the caul provides.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the kitchen he ran, which is why an item as domestic as a sausage patty arrives with two composed sauces and a cross-reference number. The dish is a crépinette, a French charcuterie form named for the crépine, the caul membrane that wraps it; the word is generally traced to the netted, lacy look of the fat itself. Crépinettes were a butcher's item in France, a way of using trimmings and offcuts in a neat portioned parcel, and they moved onto restaurant menus because they grill well and take a sauce. Soubise, the onion purée paired with the tomato here, carries the name of the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the sauce as codified belongs to the nineteenth-century kitchen, not his.