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Sausage Sandwich
Boil link sausages until done; when cold cut into thin slices; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with a pickle.
Three lines of instruction that assume a cook already knows what a link sausage is and how long it takes. The hinge is the cooling: slicing a warm sausage thin enough for a sandwich is close to impossible.
- Link sausagesFresh pork sausages in natural casing, sold in a linked chain — what a modern shop calls breakfast or country links. Not the cured, smoked, ready-to-eat kind, which would not need boiling.
- Boiling, not fryingPoach the links in barely simmering water rather than a hard boil; a rolling boil splits the casings and the fat renders out. Fifteen to twenty minutes for standard breakfast links, and pork sausage is done at 160F on an instant-read thermometer.
- "When cold"This matters more than it looks. Chill the sausages thoroughly, ideally several hours or overnight in the refrigerator, so the fat sets firm and the slices hold together at a couple of millimetres thick. Warm sausage crumbles under the knife.
- Thin slicesCut on a slight diagonal for wider rounds, and lay them overlapping so there are no gaps — a sandwich of loose coins slides apart at the first bite.
- The breadThe recipe specifies only white bread; a close-crumbed sandwich loaf is the likeliest reading, sliced thin and buttered to the edges. The butter is structural as much as flavouring: it seals the crumb against the sausage fat.
- Seasoning the book leaves outBoiled sausage is milder than fried, and these sandwiches take well to a thin smear of mustard under the butter or a grind of pepper over the meat.
- The pickleThe recipe specifies only 'a pickle'; a small sour or dill gherkin alongside the sandwich is a fair reading. Chopped into the butter it works just as well.
- YieldRoughly two standard breakfast links fill one round sandwich. Cut into quarters or fingers if serving as part of a tea or luncheon spread.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre often associated with the fashion for afternoon teas, card parties and packed luncheons, and this collection belongs squarely to it — dozens of short formulas, each a few lines, organised by filling. The meat entries are largely an argument for leftovers and cheap cuts dressed up thin. Boiling rather than frying the links is not a quirk but the point, since a poached sausage stays pale, firm and greaseless, and will sit between buttered bread for hours without soaking through — the same logic that governs a picnic hamper. The pickle garnish is the period's customary answer to a rich cold filling.