Remove the skin covering the sausage, slice it up finely, and range it crown-shaped on a side dish with a sprig of parsley in the middle and chopped parsley around.
For Arles and Lyons Sausage.—Cut in very thin slices, do not remove the skin. Slice Mortadella very thin and cut each round into two or four.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a cooked dish: Ranhofer assumes you have bought good cured sausage and only need to dress it for the cold table. The whole point turns on how the casing is handled and how thin the knife goes.
Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his "Cold Side Dishes" chapter is essentially a catalogue of hors d'oeuvre: things bought in, dressed on a small dish, and set out before the meal proper. That such a list runs through smoked garlic sausage, saucisson d'Arles, saucisson de Lyon and mortadella tells you how well supplied a first-class American kitchen already was with European charcuterie in the 1890s, when all three of these were regional specialities rather than international products. Arles sausage, from Provence, is traditionally said to have been made with a proportion of donkey or beef alongside pork; saucisson de Lyon covers several different products, from long-dried types to cooked pistachio sausage, and Ranhofer does not say which he meant; mortadella belongs to Bologna, and its name is generally traced to the mortar in which the meat paste was once pounded. Ranhofer offers no recipe for making any of them, only for presenting them, which is itself a useful reminder that a professional cook of the period bought his cured meats from specialists and spent his own labour on the knife work and the plate.