No. 754

Sausage Garnishings

Garnitures de Saucisses

Large broiled sausages one and a quarter inches in diameter are served as a garnishing, after removing their skins and cutting them across into quarter inch thick slices.

For Chipolata Garnishing use small thin sausages an inch and a half long sauted and served with Madeira wine.

For Lubeck Garnishing, fry them in the pan with some chicken fat and use with a thick gravy (No. 405).

Strasburg Smoked Sausages are small smoked ones poached for a few minutes in boiling water and served without any sauce whatever.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a set of four short garnish treatments rather than one dish, written for a kitchen that had every kind of sausage on hand and a stockpot of made sauce ready. A few of the sausage names no longer mean what they did in 1894.

The hinge: cook fresh sausage through, then sliceThe large sausages are broiled whole, peeled, and only then cut into quarter-inch coins. Slicing first bleeds out fat and juice and leaves dry discs. Fresh pork sausage wants an internal 160F, roughly 12-15 minutes over moderate heat, turned often.
ChipolataIn Ranhofer's usage this simply means a small thin sausage about an inch and a half long, rather than any one modern branded style. Any small fresh sausage of that size works. The recipe says only to sauté them and serve with Madeira; deglazing the pan with a couple of tablespoons of Madeira and reducing it to a glaze is one way to read that.
LubeckLübeck sausages were a German type named for the city; period sources are not consistent about their exact character, and nothing sold under the name is readily found today. A mild, finely ground bratwurst is a reasonable stand-in.
Strasburg smoked sausagesSmall smoked links, close to modern cocktail-size knackwurst or Vienna sausage. The recipe says to poach them a few minutes in boiling water; in practice water held just below a hard boil for 4-5 minutes is gentler, since a rolling boil splits the casings.
No. 405The cross-reference is to Ranhofer's own thickened gravy; the recipe itself specifies a thick one. Any well-reduced brown sauce or demi-glace serves the purpose; the point is that it must coat, not pool.
Chicken fatThe frying fat for the Lubeck garnish is rendered chicken fat, still sold as schmaltz. Butter browns faster and tastes different; if you substitute, use clarified butter.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield. As a garnish around a roast or ragoût, figure one large sausage or two small ones per person.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) collects thirty-odd years of his cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how a grand nineteenth-century kitchen thought about garnish: not decoration but a second, subordinate meat element arranged around the principal dish. The four sausages named are geographic shorthand of the period — chipolata from the Italian cipollata, generally traced to the onion (cipolla) that once flavoured such a ragoût; Lübeck and Strasbourg standing for the German and Alsatian charcuterie trades. That the Strasbourg links are to be served "without any sauce whatever" is a professional instruction rather than a modest one: a fully smoked sausage carries its own seasoning, and sauce on it would muddle the plate.