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Sausage, Gratinee
Boil six medium potatoes in salted water for thirty-five minutes, drain, then press through a potato masher into a saucepan. Add one ounce grated Parmesan cheese, one egg yolk, one ounce butter, a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and stir with a wooden spoon on the fire for five minutes. Dress the puree dome shape on a baking dish. Split twelve country sausages in halves lengthwise, place in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter and cook for two minutes on each side. Lift up with a fork, arrange them around and against the mashed potatoes, pour butter in pan over all and sprinkle a little fresh bread crumbs on top. Set in oven until a nice brown colour, or about twelve minutes, remove and send to table in same dish.
A duchesse-style potato mound ringed with split sausages and browned under top heat. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what temperature to set, so a few numbers need filling in.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper and 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg for roughly two pounds of potato.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual in books of this period, where ovens were judged by hand and experience. A hot oven of about 425F will brown the crumbs and butter in roughly the twelve minutes stated without drying the puree.
- Boiling timeThirty-five minutes suggests whole potatoes rather than cut ones, though the recipe does not say. Peeled and quartered, they are done in 20-25 minutes; overcooked potato takes up water and makes a slack puree that will not hold its dome.
- Dry the potatoThe five minutes of stirring over the fire is the step that matters. It drives off moisture so the mixture stiffens enough to be shaped, and it cooks the egg yolk into the mass rather than leaving it raw. Do not skip it or shorten it.
- Country sausagesFresh, coarse-ground, uncured pork links, sold now as breakfast or country-style sausage. Twelve links is roughly a pound. Two minutes a side in the pan plus twelve minutes in the oven should carry them to 160F at the centre, but check a thick one.
- ParmesanOne ounce of grated Parmesan is roughly a third of a cup loosely packed. Buy it in the piece and grate it; pre-grated cheese carries anti-caking starch that dulls the flavour in a mixture this plainly seasoned.
- ServingEnough for four as a main course. The dish goes to table in the same baking dish, so choose one that looks presentable and is shallow enough for the sausages to sit against the potato rather than sink.
Gratinée means finished under strong heat until a crust forms; the word gratin is generally traced to gratter, to scrape, i.e. the browned matter taken from the dish. The potato here is a plain version of pommes duchesse, the enriched puree with egg yolk and butter that French professional kitchens used as a piped border or base for meat, and its appearance in an early twentieth-century American compendium shows how thoroughly restaurant French technique had filtered into English-language household books. The arrangement, a dome of puree ringed with split sausages, is the kind of composed presentation that let a cheap cut of fresh pork be sent to a dining table looking deliberate. Splitting the links lengthwise also doubles the browned surface and lets the sausages lie flat against the potato.