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Sausage, Gastronome
Boil six medium, peeled potatoes in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt for thirty-five minutes, drain on a sieve, then press through potato masher into a bowl. Add an ounce fresh butter, a raw egg, level teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, sharply stir with spatula for two minutes, then incorporate little by little three-fourths gill hot milk, continually stirring meanwhile. Dress potatoes on hot dish, pyramid-like, and neatly smooth. Prickle with a fork twelve fresh country sausages, then place in frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for eight minutes, turning once in a while. Arrange sausages so they stand up against potatoes, pour butter in pan over, set in oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
Sausage and mashed potato, plated as a moulded pyramid with the sausages leaning against it. The archaic measures are the only real obstacle.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so three-fourths gill of hot milk is 6 tablespoons. Add it in stages as directed; the mash should hold a shape, not slump.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons about 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by modern standards for six potatoes — start with half and taste.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350–375F, is what this final ten minutes wants: enough to set the surface of the potato and finish the sausages through.
- The raw eggThe egg is stirred into hot mash and the dish then spends ten minutes in the oven, which will cook it at least partly; the middle of a pyramid may not get very hot, so treat it as a lightly cooked egg. It works as a binder, helping the pyramid hold its shape rather than spread.
- Potato choiceThirty-five minutes of boiling suits a floury potato such as russet or Maris Piper. Waxy potatoes will go gluey under the masher and refuse to mould.
- "Fresh country sausages"Cased fresh pork sausages of breakfast-link size (the recipe has you prick them, so they have skins), not smoked or cured. Twelve small links, roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound.
- Pricking the skinsModern advice is usually against pricking sausages, since it lets juice and fat escape. Here that is the point: the rendered butter and fat are poured over the potatoes before baking.
- Timing the sausagesEight minutes in the pan plus ten in the oven is enough for links of that size, but check that the centre reaches 160F rather than relying on the clock.
- YieldSix potatoes and twelve sausages serve four generously, or six as part of a larger meal.
Filippini's International Cook Book catalogues dishes by garnish and style in the manner of the great restaurant kitchens he came from — he spent decades at Delmonico's in New York — and "gastronome" is one of those French-derived style tags rather than a place or a person. Attached to a plate of sausages and mashed potato, it is doing a lot of work: the substance of the dish is plain pork and potato, the sort of thing eaten across northern Europe and the American countryside, but the treatment is professional. The potatoes are sieved, enriched with butter and egg, moulded into a pyramid and glazed in the oven; the sausages are set upright against it as architecture. That gap between humble material and formal presentation is characteristic of turn-of-the-century hotel cookery, where a cook was expected to be able to send out sausage and mash and have it look composed.