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Potato Sausage
1/4 lb. chopped onions ½ cupful Crisco ¼ lb. ½ lb. breadcrumbs Salt and pepper to taste 2 beaten eggs ½ lb. cold boiled mashed potatoes Mix all ingredients thoroughly well together with wooden spoon, then form into sausages; tie each well in cloth, and boil exactly as a roly-
A meatless sausage of the wartime-and-thrift school: bread, potato and egg, bound and boiled in a cloth rather than a casing. The instruction breaks off mid-word at "roly-" — the original means roly-poly pudding, boiled in a floured cloth.
- Boil as a roly-polyWrap each sausage in a scalded cloth that has been floured on the inside, tie the ends and the seam so nothing seeps in, and simmer in water; the recipe gives no time, but sausages of this size will want something on the order of an hour. Water that boils hard will work the cloth loose and waterlog the mixture; keep it at a bare simmer. Parchment inside the cloth, or a tight roll of parchment tied at both ends, does the same job with less fuss.
- Breadcrumbs1½ lb is soft fresh crumb, not dried packaged crumbs — roughly a large loaf's worth, on the order of a dozen loosely filled cups. Dried crumbs at that weight would take up far more liquid than the recipe supplies and give a dense, mealy result.
- Proportions and bindingEqual weights of crumb and potato with only two eggs is a lean bind for 3 lb of mixture. Work it firmly with the spoon so it coheres, and test one small sausage first; if it slumps, another beaten egg is the usual remedy.
- Seasoning"Salt and pepper to taste" is doing a lot of work in a mixture this bland. Sage, thyme, grated onion and a little mace all appear in comparable meatless sausage recipes of the period, and modern palates will want at least two teaspoons of salt for 3 lb plus a herb.
- Cold potatoes matterThe recipe calls for cold boiled mashed potatoes, most likely yesterday's leftovers; it also helps in practice, since warm mash goes gluey when worked. Mash them the day before and keep them chilled.
- FinishingBoiled, these are pale and soft. Unwrap, cool slightly, then brown them in a hot pan — this being a Crisco book, in Crisco, though any fat serves. The frying is what gives the dish its sausage character.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of mixture, which forms roughly ten to twelve sausages of ordinary size. They keep several days chilled and fry up well from cold.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to introduce American cooks to a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a shortening, launched by Procter & Gamble in 1911. The book's vegetarian section reflects two of Crisco's selling points at once — the fat was neither butter nor lard, so it suited both meatless cookery and kosher kitchens, a fact the company advertised explicitly. Potato sausage of this kind belongs to a broader family of British and American "mock" sausages built from breadcrumbs, pulses or nuts, which appeared steadily in reform and vegetarian cookery from the late nineteenth century onward. The boiling method borrowed here from the roly-poly pudding — a mixture rolled in a floured cloth and simmered — was standard equipment knowledge in 1913, which is why Neil felt no need to spell it out.