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Sausages, Au Vin Blanc
Cut from a sandwich loaf six half-inch-thick slices, trim off crusts, then cut each slice in two. Cut away a bed lengthwise at centre of each piece so as to easily hold a sausage, place them on a tin, then lightly prick twelve long country sausages with a needle. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons good lard in a sautoire, arrange in it the sausages one beside another, and cook for five minutes on each side. Lift up with fork, place over beds of bread on tin, baste evenly with all fat of sautoire and set in oven for eight minutes, or until toasts have attained a nice golden colour. Place a finely chopped onion in the sautoire with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile, then pour in one gill good white wine, stir well at bottom so as to dilute the sausages, glaze with wine, briskly cook on a lively fire until nearly dry, then add half gill demi-glace, half gill water, a tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, half teaspoon chopped parsley and half bean very finely chopped garlic. Mix well, boil for five minutes more, dress sausages on a large dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A pan-sautéed sausage dish finished with a quick white-wine pan sauce, built on toasted bread beds. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel names, the gill measure and the demi-glace all need translating.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold twelve links in a single layer without crowding. A 12-inch skillet works; two pans are better than piling the sausages up.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. So one gill of white wine, then a quarter cup each of demi-glace and water to finish the sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. The bread only has to toast and colour in eight minutes under the basting fat, so a fairly hot oven is implied; something in the region of 400F is a reasonable modern guess rather than anything the book specifies.
- Sausage donenessTen minutes in the pan plus eight in the oven should be ample for standard-gauge links, but fresh pork sausage wants an internal temperature of 160F. Check the thickest one rather than trusting the clock, since "long country sausages" varied a good deal in thickness.
- PrickingThe needle is deliberate: it lets fat escape to baste the bread and keeps the skins from bursting. A few shallow pricks are enough — shredding the casing leaves the sausages dry.
- Demi-glaceA rich brown sauce: espagnole combined with brown stock and reduced, kept ready to hand in professional kitchens of the period. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced brown stock stands in; if using a salty concentrate, hold back on the Worcestershire until you taste.
- "Dilute the sausages"Period cookbook English for wetting the pan and loosening what has stuck to it, i.e. deglazing. Add the wine to the hot pan and scrape the browned fond off the bottom; much of the sauce's flavour comes from that residue.
- Half a bean of garlicHalf a clove; "bean" is the book's unit for a garlic clove. The quantity is small, a background note rather than a dominant flavour.
- YieldSix slices halved gives twelve bread beds for twelve sausages — four to six servings as a main course, or six as a lunch dish.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written after decades at Delmonico's in New York, where he served as steward and manager as much as cook, and the recipe shows the house method in miniature: a French pan sauce applied to a plain, cheap ingredient. The bread "bed" hollowed to cradle each sausage is a croûte in the old sense — the toast is structural and edible at once, catching the rendered fat instead of letting it pool on the platter. The Worcestershire sauce might be taken as a sign that this is an Anglo-American kitchen rather than a Parisian one, though that is inference; bottled sauces seem to have been common enough in American professional cookery by this date, used much as a cook now uses soy or fish sauce for depth. "Country sausage" in the period is generally said to have meant a coarse fresh pork link, often described as seasoned with sage and pepper, sold long rather than in the short breakfast size.