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Lyon Sausage
Procure a small Lyon sausage. Remove the silver paper from about a quarter of the length of the sausage. Remove the tip, then with a sharp knife cut off twelve very thin equal slices, remove the skin from the slices, dress on a hors-d'oeuvres dish, decorate the dish with a little parsley greens and serve. (Always keep the remaining sausage in a cool place.)
This is an assembly instruction rather than a cooked dish, and almost everything that can go wrong is in the slicing and the storage.
- What the sausage isLyon sausage means saucisson de Lyon, an air-dried cured pork sausage, firm enough to slice thin and eaten without cooking. Look for saucisson sec, rosette de Lyon, or a comparable Italian salame; a soft cooked sausage will not slice cleanly and is not what is meant here.
- Silver paperThe foil or tinfoil wrapper in which good charcuterie was sold. Modern sausage comes in plastic or nothing at all; peel back only the length you intend to cut so the rest stays protected.
- Peeling the slicesThe casing comes away far more easily if you score it lengthwise and strip it from the whole exposed section before cutting, rather than picking it off twelve separate rounds. If the casing is stubborn, wrap the sausage in a damp cloth for ten minutes.
- Thin means thinAim for slices you can nearly see through, around 1 to 2 mm. A very sharp, long-bladed knife drawn in one stroke beats a serrated one; a well-chilled sausage cuts more cleanly than one at room temperature.
- Serving temperatureCut cold, then let the slices sit fifteen minutes before serving. Dry sausage tastes flat and waxy straight from the refrigerator, and the fat needs to soften to carry the flavour.
- "A cool place"For the period this meant a larder or cellar well below kitchen temperature, where a whole dry sausage keeps for weeks. In a modern kitchen, refrigerate it, with the cut face pressed against paper or lightly wrapped rather than sealed in plastic, which traps moisture and encourages surface mould.
- YieldThe recipe specifies twelve slices and no number of eaters; a plate this size reads as one item among several on a table of hors-d'oeuvres variés rather than a course in itself.
- The garnishParsley in small sprigs, dry and unwilted. Cornichons, radishes or unsalted butter with bread are traditional companions and do not offend the spirit of the original.
Lyon has been France's charcuterie capital for centuries, and saucisson de Lyon — coarse lean pork studded with cubes of back fat, seasoned simply and dried for weeks — is the plainest of its exports, alongside the fatter, wider rosette and the truffled or pistachio-studded versions sold in the city's charcuteries. That a book of this vintage tells a cook only to unwrap, peel and slice says a good deal about how such volumes worked: the sausage itself was bought, not made, and the recipe is really a lesson in presentation for a household or hotel kitchen setting out hors-d'oeuvres variés, the little plates of cured meat, pickles and salads that opened a formal French meal. The instruction to count out twelve equal slices and dress them on their own dish is the point.