Home › The World's Kitchen › Soucisses, Mode Du Bearn
Soucisses, Mode Du Bearn
Place in a small tureen a pint good white wine, four beans sound garlic and two very dry crushed limes, cover pot, let reduce on fire to one-third the quantity, remove and let cool off. Chop, but not too finely, two pounds fresh fat pork with the four beans garlic cooked in wine, place force in a tureen on ice and strain wine through a cheesecloth into it. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and mix well with a wooden spoon until well amalgamated. Thoroughly wash and wipe four ounces sheep's guts, with aid of a funnel fill them with preparation, being careful that they are not pierced or cut, also seeing that force is rather loose in them. Tightly tie guts in four-inch sections, stretch a strong string across kitchen or room of moderate temperature, hang up sausages and let stand to dry for three days, lightly prickling with a needle before hanging. The best way to cook them is with white wine.
SOERABAIA CURRY (FROGS'-LEGS CURRY) Cut claws off two pounds fresh frogs' legs and keep on a plate until required. Place in a saucepan a hashed onion, a bean crushed sound garlic, a finely chopped, seeded green pepper, an ounce chopped raw ham, two chopped, peeled, seeded red tomatoes, add two tablespoons melted butter and fry for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Add legs with a teaspoon each curry powder and salt, three saltspoons pepper, a saltspoon each thyme and powdered bay leaf, stir well, cook on range for ten minutes and moisten with two and a half gills broth. Cover pan and set in oven for fifteen minutes, bring to oven door and add boiled rice. Mix well, reset in oven for ten minutes, remove, dress curry dome-shape on a hot dish and serve with Indian chutney separately.
Two unrelated recipes have run together on this page: a Béarnaise fresh-pork sausage, air-dried at room temperature, and a Javanese-style frogs'-leg curry. The sausage cannot be made safely today; the notes below explain why, and then cover the curry.
- Why the sausage failsTwo pounds of raw fat pork is seasoned with one teaspoon of salt — well under 1 percent by weight — and hung in a room at ambient temperature for three days with no nitrite, no starter culture, no measured humidity and no cooking step. Safe dry-cured sausage depends on salt at a measured percentage, curing salt containing sodium nitrite, and controlled temperature and humidity; without them the interior sits for days in the range where Clostridium botulinum, Staphylococcus aureus and salmonella multiply. "The best way to cook them is with white wine" gives no temperature and does not undo toxin already formed.
- The sheep's casings are a second problemNatural casings today are sold salted or in brine, which both preserves them and reduces their microbial load; raw guts carry heavy bacterial loads. Washing and wiping four ounces of them, as instructed, is not a treatment. If you want dry sausage, follow a current recipe with weighed cure and a controlled chamber.
- "Four beans garlic"Filippini uses "bean" here for a clove — four cloves of garlic, and in the curry "a bean crushed sound garlic" is one clove. "Sound" simply means unblemished, no green shoots or soft spots.
- Frogs' legs: the claws"Cut claws off" means trimming the feet from the legs. Frozen legs, thawed and patted dry, work as well as fresh; two pounds is four to six servings once the rice is folded in.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two and a half gills of broth is about 1¼ cups. A saltspoon is a scant ¼ teaspoon — three saltspoons of pepper is a generous ¾ teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for a curry of this size.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book supplies no oven term here. A covered pan finishing in the oven for fifteen minutes, then ten more after the rice goes in, will do well at a moderate heat, around 350°F. The legs are thin and cook through quickly, so the second stint serves mainly to warm the rice through.
- Have the rice readyThe recipe assumes cooked rice on hand, which the original never tells you to make. Boil and drain roughly 1½ cups raw long-grain rice beforehand and keep it warm, or the dish stalls at the oven door.
- Dressing it dome-shapePack the finished curry into a bowl and invert it onto the hot platter. Serve the chutney separately, as written — mixing it in flattens the pepper and thyme.
History: Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) sets recipes from many national kitchens side by side, and this page shows the seams: a sausage from Béarn, in the Pyrenean southwest of France, sits directly against a curry named for Soerabaia — Surabaya, the great port of Dutch-ruled East Java. Frog is still widely eaten in East Java, where frog dishes belong to the Chinese-Indonesian repertoire rather than the French one, and such dishes were plausibly carried into European print by way of the Dutch colonial table — the same route by which many nineteenth-century "curries" reached Western cookbooks with a spoonful of commercial curry powder standing in for a spice paste. The Béarnaise sausage belongs to the older farmhouse world of salting and hanging pork in cold weather in an unheated room; the technique is real, but the book records it as gesture rather than method, omitting the season, the cellar and the salt ratio that made it work.