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Chipolata Garnish
(A Spanish recipe.) In Spain chicken or sweetbread or any entree is rendered attractive by the addition of Chipolata.
Cut up into neat pieces equal parts of carrots, chestnuts (parboiled and free from shell.), mush-rooms, turnips, and small sausages. Cover with consomme and cook until tender, adding a spoonful of sherry, pepper, and salt. CARAMEL (for coloring soups.).
French cooks keep a bottle of this on hand to use for gravies and soups which are too pale.
Stir 1/2 pound of sugar and a tablespoonful of water constantly over the fire until a rich brown, being very careful not to let it burn. Add 1 cup of water and a little salt and cook 10 minutes longer. Cool and strain it and bottle tightly in small bottles. Will keep a year, if corked, and in a cool place.
Two entries run together here: a vegetable-and-sausage garnish meant to be spooned around a roast or an entree, and the burnt-sugar colouring that every professional kitchen of the period kept in a bottle. Both are still useful; the caramel needs the most care.
- The hinge: cook the vegetables in stagesThe instruction to cook everything together until tender will give you mushrooms and chestnuts that have collapsed before the turnips are done. Give carrots and turnips a head start of about 10 minutes, add browned sausages and chestnuts, then the mushrooms for the last 4 or 5 minutes.
- Chipolata sausages"Small sausages" here means the thin fresh pork links the French call chipolatas, about the thickness of a finger and unsmoked. Breakfast links are the closest supermarket substitute; brown them first, since they will not colour in consomme.
- ChestnutsFresh chestnuts must be scored, boiled 5 minutes and peeled while hot, inner skin and all. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are already at the stage the recipe describes and only need warming through, and they break up easily, so fold them in rather than stirring.
- ConsommeAny well-flavoured, unthickened brown stock will do. Use just enough to barely cover; the point is that it reduces to a glaze around the vegetables, so a tinned consomme diluted with water is closer to the intent than a heavily salted broth.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities beyond "equal parts"; a cup of each of the five elements would make roughly enough garnish for a 4-5 lb chicken or a platter for six. It is a garnish, not a side dish, and is meant to be arranged around the meat with the reduced liquid spooned over.
- Caramel: the water goes in off the heatHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups. Take the pan off the burner before adding the cup of water: sugar at that stage is well above 300F and the water will flash to steam and spit. Add it at arm's length, then return to the heat to dissolve the hardened caramel.
- How dark is "rich brown"Take it past amber to the colour of strong coffee, just short of smoking. Under-cooked caramel colours weakly and sweetens the gravy; the bitterness of a very dark caramel is what makes it neutral in use. A tablespoon of water with the sugar only helps it melt evenly.
- Keeping itThe recipe's year assumes a tight cork and a cool place; by modern standards that is still optimistic. It is a thin sugar syrup and can mould once opened; keep it in the refrigerator and check it before use. Add it drop by drop with a spoon, since very little will darken a quart of soup.
Chipolata is a French kitchen term rather than a Spanish one, whatever this book's headnote says: a garniture a la chipolata in the classical repertoire means small sausages with chestnuts, glazed carrots and onions, and often lardons, served round poultry, sweetbreads or braised beef. The name is generally traced to the Italian cipollata, from cipolla, onion, and it is often said that the small link sausage took the garnish's name rather than the other way round. Its appearance in a book of this kind says a good deal about how home cooks encountered continental food, as a set of decorative finishes attached loosely to a country. The caramel that follows is the older solution to a problem now handled by a bottle of gravy browning: pale stock and pale sauces looked underdone at table, and a burnt-sugar syrup gave colour without flavour or thickening, which is exactly why the sugar is taken far enough to lose its sweetness.