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Sausage (Sausages are delicious when)
Sausages are delicious when boiled with rice until both are sufficiently cooked. Whole spice and black pepper should be put in during the cooking. Another way of serving sausages is to brown them in a pan, then spread them with horseradish and serve on squares of toast. Still another acceptable way of preparing sausage is to wipe the sausage dry, dip them in beaten egg and bread crumbs, put them in the frying basket and plunge into boiling fat Cook ten minutes.
Three quick treatments for fresh breakfast sausage, written in the shorthand of a period cookbook that assumed you already knew how sausage behaved in a pan. The usable detail is in what the text leaves out.
- What "sausage" meant hereThe text does not say, but the three methods suit a fresh, uncured sausage of the kind sold in bulk or in short natural casings, and American breakfast sausage of the period was commonly pork and often sage-seasoned. Modern bulk breakfast sausage is the closest match; a smoked or fully cooked link will not behave the same way in any of the three methods.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockAll three methods should finish at 160F on an instant-read thermometer in the centre of the link. Fresh pork sausage that is still pink at the core after ten minutes in fat needs more time, whatever the recipe says.
- The boiled rice versionRoughly 1 cup long-grain rice to 2 cups water, with the sausages laid on top, covered, about 18-20 minutes. The sausage renders into the rice and seasons it, which is the point of the dish; browning the links first in the same pan improves it considerably.
- "Whole spice"Most likely means simply spices left whole rather than ground; allspice berries are the usual candidate, and a mixed pickling spice would serve the same purpose. A few berries, a bay leaf and a half-teaspoon of black peppercorns suit the rice; strain or fish them out before serving.
- Frying basket and "boiling fat"Read as deep fat at roughly 350-360F. Fat does not boil at frying temperatures, and if it appears to, it is water in the food flashing to steam. Ten minutes may be longer than a small coated link needs; go by the colour of the crumbs and the temperature at the centre rather than the clock.
- Dry the sausage first, and mean itThe instruction to wipe them dry is the hinge of the fried version. Surface moisture keeps egg and crumb from adhering, and the coating will slide off in the fat. Dry, then flour lightly, then egg, then crumbs.
- Horseradish on toastUse prepared horseradish, drained of most of its vinegar, or the toast goes soggy under it. Split the browned links lengthwise before spreading so the horseradish sits against the cut face.
- YieldFigure two to three links per person at breakfast. The rice method as scaled above serves four.
Breakfast sausage was a fixture of the American morning table long before this book appeared, and the three variations here show a cookbook doing what such books did best: extending a cheap, familiar ingredient into something that could be put on a table more than once a week without complaint. The deep-fried, egg-and-crumbed version reflects the era's enthusiasm for the wire frying basket, a piece of equipment that domestic-science writers of the 1890s and 1900s are often said to have promoted as a mark of the modern, efficient kitchen. Horseradish with pork is an old northern European pairing, traditionally held to have reached American tables with German and Central European cooks, and the sausage-and-rice dish belongs to the broad family of one-pot dishes in which a small amount of fatty meat flavours a much larger amount of grain -- a habit of thrift, not of luxury, however the word "delicious" is deployed at the top of the entry.