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Andouillettes of Nancy
Nancy, St. Menehould, Arles, and Lyons are as famous for their sausages as Frankfurt and Brunswick and Bologna. But the French preparations are much daintier than those of Italy and Germany.
Take 2 pounds of veal and one of fresh pork. Cook the latter two hours in salted water, and chop both very fine, with 2 onions, 3 truffles, and 4 mushrooms, adding parsley, salt, and parsley, salt, and pepper. Mix well and press into sausage skins,--which can be bought from a butcher,--tie them at intervals of 2 inches and boil them for an hour in 1 quart of consomme flavored with 2 carrots, 2 turnips, and 1/4 of a cabbage. This can be used later for soup. Let them cool, cut apart, and fry them 25 minutes in butter, then serve them with omelette or poached eggs.
PIGS' FEET (as cooked in St. Menehould.) Clean and split 2 large feet, then tie them securely and put in a quart of stock, or broth, with salt, pepper, a carrot, an onion, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, a clove, and two pieces of celery. Cover and cook 3 hours. Drain, remove the bones, put under a weight, and when cold dip in butter and bread-crumbs and broil until brown. Serve hot with Tartare sauce or a cream sauce with mushrooms in it.
Two related recipes are run together here, both built on long simmering in stock. The quantities are workable, but the frying time at the end belongs to an era of thicker casings and cooler pans.
- The quantities, plainly2 lb veal and 1 lb fresh pork (the "one" refers back to pounds). After the pork has boiled its two hours that gives a little under 3 lb of forcemeat, which should serve eight or so as an entree with eggs.
- A garbled line"Adding parsley, salt, and parsley, salt, and pepper" is a printer's repetition. Read it once: parsley, salt, pepper.
- Only the pork is pre-cookedThe two hours in salted water applies to the fresh pork alone; the veal goes in raw. Everything is then brought to a safe temperature during the hour in consomme, so aim for 160F at the centre of a sausage before it comes out of the broth.
- CasingsHog casings, sold salted or in brine, are the right size for a 2-inch link. Rinse and soak them 30 minutes in warm water and flush the insides before filling. Fill loosely or they burst when the forcemeat expands in the broth.
- Fry for minutes, not 25The sausages are fully cooked when they leave the consomme. Twenty-five minutes in butter will dry them out and blacken the butter; four or five minutes over medium heat, turning, is enough to colour them.
- Truffles and mushroomsThree truffles is a 1900s luxury measure, not a modern one. A tablespoon of chopped preserved truffle, or a teaspoon of truffle in oil stirred in at the end, gives the intended note; the four mushrooms should be brown or cremini, chopped fine.
- The broth is part of the recipeA quart of consomme with carrot, turnip and a quarter cabbage barely covers 3 lb of sausage. Use a narrow pan, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a boil so the casings hold, and top up with water. Strain and save it as the author says.
- The pigs' feetThree hours covered is right for split feet, and pressing them cold under a weight is what makes them sliceable. "Dip in butter" means melted butter, as the glue for the crumbs; broil close to the element until the crust browns, about five minutes a side.
An andouillette in France is normally a coarse sausage of pork chitterlings and stomach, and Troyes, Lyon and Cambrai still argue over whose is best; what Adelaide Keen sets down here is the gentler drawing-room version, a fine veal-and-pork forcemeat that borrows the name and the shape without the offal. She insists at the outset that the French preparations are "daintier" than the Italian and German. Sainte-Menehould, in the Champagne region, is named twice for good reason: the town's pieds de porc a la Sainte-Menehould, simmered until the small bones give way and then crumbed and grilled, has been its signature dish for well over two centuries, and its origin is a matter of culinary tradition rather than documented history, the tale of the forgotten pot usually being dated around 1730. The pairing of a sausage with an omelette or poached eggs, and the instruction to keep the cooking broth for tomorrow's soup, both mark this as bourgeois household cooking rather than restaurant work.