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Chicken Sausages
Chicken sausages are a delicate and delicious "made over" dish, or may be prepared from uncooked chicken. Separate from the bone and skin remnants of cold chicken and chop them as fine as possible. Add to every pint of chopped meat a blanched sweetbread, chopped fine, and a tablespoonful of butter. Add also to the mixture one half as much bread crumbs as there is of the chopped meat. Add if convenient two or three chopped mushrooms. Mix half a cupful of cream and two eggs in every pint of meat and bread crumbs. Season with salt and white pepper, and stir in afterward the whites of two eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Put two tablespoonfuls of the mixture in each of the small squares of mosquito netting washed and cut for the purpose, and drop them into boiling water to cook for seven minutes or until the egg is set. Untie the sausages and when they are cold dip them into melted butter and brown them in a frying pan or broil them on a gridiron. These sausages are nice served with a few drops of lemon juice squeezed over them and a little melted butter added as they are sent to the table. They are especially fine when made of raw chicken. In that case they must be cooked in boiling water about five minutes longer.
This is a quenelle in all but name: forcemeat poached in cloth, then chilled, buttered and browned. Two details do the work — a gentle poach rather than a hard boil, and a thoroughly cold sausage before it hits the pan.
- The hinge: poach, don't boil"Boiling water" here should be water held at a bare simmer, 180-190F, with the bundles fully submerged. A rolling boil throws the parcels around and squeezes moisture out of an egg-and-cream forcemeat, leaving it grainy.
- Mosquito nettingCotton netting was a cheap, widely available cloth of the period; the recipe has it washed before use. Use rinsed cheesecloth in doubled 5-inch squares, tied with kitchen twine, or roll the mixture into tight cylinders in plastic wrap with the ends twisted and tied. Nylon window screening is not food-safe.
- QuantitiesA pint of chopped meat is roughly 1 lb, or the pickings from a good-sized roast chicken. The recipe's ratios give half a pint of crumbs to each pint of meat, with half a cupful of cream and two eggs to every pint of the combined meat and crumbs, plus the two beaten whites stirred in at the end. At two tablespoonfuls apiece that makes something on the order of two dozen small sausages.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads are a special order from a butcher. To blanch them: soak in cold water an hour or two, then simmer 10 minutes, cool, and peel off the membrane before chopping. If you skip them, add another 2 oz of chicken and a spoonful more butter; the texture will be slightly less silky.
- Raw chicken versionThe extra five minutes is about right for two-tablespoon parcels, but check rather than trust the clock: the centre should reach 165F. Grinding the raw meat twice, or pulsing it cold in a food processor with the butter, gives a smoother bind than hand chopping.
- Chill before browning"When they are cold" is not optional. A warm sausage will slump and break in the pan. Refrigerate the poached, unwrapped sausages at least an hour — overnight is better — then dip in melted butter and brown briskly.
- White pepperThe usual choice for pale forcemeats, so the mixture stays unspeckled. Season the mixture assertively; cream and bread crumbs dull salt considerably once cooked.
Chicken sausages of this kind belong to the American "made over" tradition, the frugal discipline of turning yesterday's roast into something that did not look like leftovers — a preoccupation of nearly every domestic cookbook between the 1870s and the First World War. The technique has a French cousin: a forcemeat of pounded white meat, cream and egg, which in a professional kitchen would be shaped into quenelles with two spoons and poached in stock; here the binding is simply bread crumbs stirred into chopped meat. Wrapping the mixture in squares of cheap cotton mosquito netting is the household adaptation, and a common one in books of this period, where netting was also used for covering food against flies. The blanched sweetbread is the mark of a still-genteel table.