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Sausage, Porto Rico
Peel and core two sound apples and finely slice them, also slice four peeled sound bananas the same way. Place in saucepan with ounce butter, three saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply stir with wooden spoon, cover pan, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, press through a wire sieve into another saucepan and keep hot. With a needle, prickle the skin of twelve raw country sausages, heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add sausages and fry for five minutes on each side. Nicely dress the puree on a hot dish, arrange sausages over puree, remove fat from sausage pan, pour in a half gill port wine, boil three minutes, pour over sausages and serve.
A fruit puree under fried sausages, finished with a port pan sauce. The measurements are pre-standard and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, which is right for the volume of fruit here; the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 teaspoon each and the cayenne in particular is assertive.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of port is 1/4 cup. Use a ruby or tawny port rather than anything labelled cooking wine.
- Oven heatNone is given. Moderate, around 350F, is what this softening step wants — hot enough to break the apple down in twenty-five minutes without catching the butter.
- Country sausagesIn this period the term generally meant a fresh, coarse, uncured pork sausage, often sold in bulk as well as in links; the instruction to prick the skin shows cased links are wanted here. Twelve small links is roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter. Bulk pork sausage rolled into links works; smoked or cured sausage does not, since the recipe depends on rendering raw fat into the pan for the sauce.
- Do not prick, or prick sparinglyThe pricking instruction is meant to stop bursting, but it drains fat and juice and gives a drier sausage. Modern practice leaves the casings whole and controls bursting with moderate heat instead.
- Frying timeFive minutes a side over moderate heat browns them, but check that fresh pork sausage reaches 160F at the centre. Thicker links will need turning more than twice rather than being pushed harder on two faces.
- The sievePressing hot apple and banana through a wire sieve is the fussiest step and produces a very smooth puree. A food mill on the fine plate does the same job; a blender will work but gives a gummier result, as banana turns pasty when overworked.
- The pan saucePour off the fat but keep the browned residue, then boil the port hard for the full three minutes so the alcohol edge cooks off and the liquid syrups slightly. A knob of butter swirled in off the heat holds it together on the plate.
- YieldServes four as a main course with bread, or six as part of a larger meal.
Filippini's The International Cook Book sorted dishes by nationality with a generous hand, and the Porto Rico label here — the American spelling that appears in the December 1898 Treaty of Paris and was carried into the Foraker Act of 1900, remaining official until 1932 — points less to a documented Puerto Rican recipe than to the combination of banana and cayenne, which read as tropical to a New York kitchen of the period. Puerto Rico had been under United States administration for less than a decade when this book appeared, and its foods were entering mainland cookbooks in simplified, often invented form. What is genuine is the pairing itself: fried pork with sweet cooked fruit is old and widespread, from apple sauce with pork in England to plantains served alongside pork throughout the Caribbean, and the port deglaze is straight French restaurant practice of the sort Filippini learned at Delmonico's.