No. 1806

Sausages with Truffles

Saucisses aux Truffes

Take two pounds of fresh pork meat from the neck; remove carefully all the fibrous parts retaining as much meat as fat; season with an ounce and a half of salt, a teaspoonful of freshly ground allspice, and add four ounces of truffles cut in small dice or finely chopped. Make sausages of this preparation, broil and dress them on a garnishing of minced truffles mingled with supreme sauce (No. 547).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A plain fresh sausage whose only complication is the salt figure, which does not translate directly to modern practice. Everything else is a matter of grind, fat and heat.

The salt is the hingeAn ounce and a half of salt to two pounds of meat is roughly 4.5 percent by weight — closer to a dry-cure ratio than a fresh sausage. Modern fresh sausage runs 1.5 to 2 percent, which for two pounds is about 2 to 3 teaspoons of fine salt. Ranhofer's kitchen may have been working with saltier period salt weights and a very different palate, but as written the meat will be inedibly salty.
"Fresh pork meat from the neck"This is the collar or coppa end of the shoulder, sold today as pork neck or, close enough, boneless Boston butt. It runs fatty, roughly 20 to 30 percent, and the instruction to retain "as much meat as fat" points to a generously fatty mix, possibly fattier still. Do not trim it lean.
Grind and mixCoarse grind, single pass through a 3/8-inch plate, keeps the texture the dish wants. Keep the meat near freezing throughout so the fat does not smear, then mix only until the mass just becomes tacky.
TrufflesFour ounces of truffle to two pounds of meat is a Delmonico's proportion, not a household one. Fresh black winter truffle at current prices makes this a very expensive pound of sausage; preserved truffle in jars, or truffle peelings, will carry the aroma at a fraction of the cost. Truffle oil is a different flavour and will not behave the same way when cooked.
Casings or not"Make sausages of this preparation" assumes hog casings, soaked and rinsed, stuffed without air pockets and twisted into four-inch links. Formed into flat cakes and cooked the same way, the mixture works perfectly well without casing.
Rest before cookingGive the seasoned mixture a night in the refrigerator before stuffing. The truffle perfume moves into the fat, and the salt firms the bind.
BroilingPeriod broiling means over coals, at moderate rather than fierce heat, turned often — about 12 to 15 minutes for a link. Under a modern overhead broiler, set the rack low and go slowly; fast high heat splits the casings and drives out the fat that carries the truffle. Cook to 160F internal.
Supreme sauceNo. 547 is Ranhofer's supreme sauce; in classical terms sauce supreme is a chicken velouté finished with cream and butter — chicken stock thickened with a white roux, reduced, then enriched. That is the intended bed, with the minced truffle stirred through it at the last moment off the heat.
YieldTwo pounds of meat gives roughly eight links, serving four to six as a course.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the truffle proportion tells you which kitchen it came out of: four ounces of truffle worked into a pork sausage and then more truffle minced into the sauce is restaurant extravagance, aimed at diners who expected to taste what they were paying for. The dish itself is unremarkable French charcuterie — fresh saucisse of neck pork, seasoned with salt and allspice, grilled and sauced — and the numbered cross-reference to sauce suprême is characteristic of the book's method, where nearly every dish depends on a base preparation catalogued elsewhere. Truffles reaching American tables in this period generally arrived in preserved form, imported from France, which is one reason a recipe like this could appear in a New York book at all; Ranhofer used them freely across the volume, in garnishes, forcemeats and sauces, as a marker of a luxury course.