No. 1807

Sausages Long—with White Wine

Saucisses Longues au vin Blanc

Prepare some five or six inch length sausages the same as the Chipolata (No. 1801), prick them with a small larding needle, fry in fresh butter, and when cooked dress on a dish; drain the butter from the sautoir and replace it by white wine, chablis, sauterne or champagne, one or the other, extending the sauce with veloute sauce (No. 415); boil it up once, strain through a tammy, and finish with lemon juice and fresh butter; pour it over the sausages.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has velouté on the stove and a tammy on the hook, so the quantities are left to judgment. The dish is a pan-fried sausage with a butter-mounted wine velouté, and it comes together in the time the sausages take to cook.

The hinge: finish the sauce off the heatThe lemon juice and fresh butter go in at the end, away from the flame, swirled rather than stirred. Boil the sauce after the butter is added and it will break into a greasy film.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, not a sloped skillet. Any heavy 10-inch pan works, but the straight sides hold the small volume of wine and sauce deep enough to reduce evenly.
TammyA tamis, a stretched worsted cloth through which sauce was forced with a wooden spoon. A fine chinois or a conical strainer lined with muslin does the same job.
Chipolata sausages (No. 1801)Ranhofer sends you to his chipolata recipe for the sausage itself; this page only specifies the length. Any good fresh pork sausage of sheep-casing thickness will stand in; the point is five- or six-inch lengths, not the finger-sized cocktail chipolatas sold today.
PrickingPiercing sausages lets fat and juice escape and is generally avoided now. In butter over gentle heat there is little risk of a casing bursting, so this step can be skipped.
Proportions, since none are givenFor a pound of sausages, roughly 1/2 cup of dry white wine reduced by half, then about 1 cup of velouté. Chablis or a dry sauternes-style wine both work; a bone-dry sparkling wine gives the sharpest version.
Velouté No. 415A blond roux slackened with veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats. A cup of well-reduced light stock thickened with a beurre manié is the practical shortcut.
HeatButter alone will brown before the sausages are cooked through. Keep the pan at medium, turning often, and expect 12 to 15 minutes for sausages of this size; an internal 160F is the modern mark.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its pork chapter reads like a French charcuterie manual transplanted to Manhattan. Sausages served in a wine-and-velouté sauce belong to a nineteenth-century French repertoire in which almost any fried or poached item could be finished by deglazing the pan and binding the liquid with a mother sauce; the named wines here — Chablis, sauterne, champagne — are less about regional pairing than about what a well-stocked American hotel cellar of the 1880s actually held. The chipolata name is generally traced to the Italian cipolla, onion, by way of a garnish of onions, chestnuts and sausages that French cooks called à la chipolata; by Ranhofer's day the word had drifted to mean the small sausage itself. That drift is why the modern British chipolata is a slim breakfast link with no onion in sight.