Gayettes de Provence
Gayettes, a French equivalent to our West Country faggots, are often to be found in charcuteries and homely restaurants in Provence and the Ardèche, where they make a speciality of gayettes aux épinards (below). They look like faggots, very appetizing in their brown hummocky rows. Strictly for hungry picnickers on chilly days, when they taste delicious if you wrap them in a double layer of silver foil and reheat in wood ashes on the edge of the fire. The non-spinach gayettes are often eaten cold, in slices, as an hors d’œuvre. I recommend black olives with them, and plenty of bread and unsalted butter.
1 lb. pig’s liver
¼ lb. hard back fat
¼ lb. lean pork (neck or shoulder)
Piece of caul fat
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
Salt, pepper and spices to taste
Plenty of parsley, or other herb, chopped
Mince the meat, season and wrap in pieces of caul fat–as for crépinettes, but gayettes are more the shape of small round dumplings. Lay them close together in a lard-greased baking dish. The oval, yellow and brown French gratin dishes are ideal.
Melt a little lard and pour over. Bake for 40 minutes in a medium oven. The top will brown nicely, and you can turn them over half time though this is not the conventional thing to do. Like faggots, gayettes are good tempered–you can stretch the cooking time with a slower oven and raise the heat to brown them at the end. Eat cold, sliced, as an hors d’œuvre.
Gayettes: economical recipe
From the charcutier’s point of view, gayettes are a way of using up the pig’s lungs and spleen. If you want to be really economical, you can do the same and ask the butcher for a mixture of liver, lights and spleen, with more liver than anything else. Cut off all the gristly bits when you get home, weigh the result, and add one third of the weight in sausage-meat (half fat, half lean pork).
Then follow the above recipe.
Gayettes aux Épinards
½ lb. sausage-meat (half lean pork, half back fat)
½ lb. Swiss Chard leaves, or Spinach or Perpetual Beet (poirée)
½ lb. spinach (épinard)
Few leaves of garden sorrel (oseille)
2 oz. plain flour
A dash of hard liquor
Caul fat
Salt and pepper and spices
Wash the beet greens and spinach, shake off as much water as possible, and put in a pan over a low heat with a knob of butter or lard. No extra water should be needed, if you keep the pan covered and shake well from time to time to prevent sticking. Drain well, and chop with the uncooked sorrel. Stir in the flour, then the sausage-meat and seasonings. Finish like gayettes de provence, but eat them hot.
NOTE: Frozen spinach does quite well, follow instructions on the packet and dry thoroughly. Allow for different quantity.
If you can’t get beet leaves, use all spinach and a stalk of celery chopped finely but not to a mush.
If you can’t get sorrel, use a squeeze or two of lemon juice. Though I should say, go out and buy a packet of sorrel seed immediately. Once sown, it’s there for ever, welcoming the spring with its clear sharp taste and lasting until the first severe frosts. Invaluable for soups, spinach purées and sauces for veal or fish.
Boulettes de Bretagne
Boulettes are sold in Breton charcuteries, and, as their name suggests, they are round like large bullets, resembling the southern gayettes or English faggots in appearance, though the meat mixture is a little different. They are eaten cold, sliced, with crusty bread or toast, like a pâté:
Piece of caul fat
1 lb. lean pork, boned - or 1¾ lb. interlarded pork
¾ lb. fat pork - or 1¾ lb. interlarded pork
¼ lb. lean bacon, smoked or green
Pepper, herbs, a little salt
Mince the lean pork, fat pork and bacon together coarsely, or chop them by hand. Season the mixture, but don’t use too much salt owing to the inclusion of the bacon.
Follow the gayette recipe for forming the boulettes, and baking them.
Faggots
Whilst I am making gayettes (which keep well in a refrigerator, or under a half-inch layer of lard), I often make a dish of faggots to be eaten hot from the oven at a hungry family lunch. Peas are the traditional accompaniment to this favourite Wiltshire dish; preferably petits pois cooked with a sage leaf or two, and finished with a sprinkling of chopped sage. And potatoes, boiled in their skins, then peeled and quartered. Homely perhaps, but most satisfactory, like the gayettes aux épinards.
The big Oxford Dictionary gives the meaning of faggot as bundle—in this case a somewhat derogatory description of the ingredients—deriving from the Old French fagot. And what about gayette? Do both words come from fegato, the Italian for liver? But fegato, fagotto, fagot or faggot, here’s the recipe:
1 lb. pig’s liver (or liver and kidney)
10 oz. fat belly of pork, fresh or salted or 6 oz. hard back fat and 4 oz. lean pork
Large piece of caul fat
2 medium onions, chopped
Sage leaves
½ teaspoon mace (or nutmeg and cinnamon)
2 medium eggs
4 oz. fresh breadcrumbs
A little well-flavoured stock, or gravy left from a roast
Salt, black pepper
1 clove of garlic crushed
Put the meat, minced, in a heavy pan with the onion, sage leaves, chopped, garlic, salt and pepper. Give it half an hour on a low heat, stirring occasionally to prevent it browning.
Drain off the juice into a small basin, mix the meat with the mace, beaten eggs and enough breadcrumbs to make a stiffish, easy to handle mixture. Taste and adjust seasoning. Put the caul fat into a bowl of tepid water with a tablespoon of vinegar, and cut, when pliable, into 5 inch squares, wrapping each one round a dumpling-sized piece of the meat mixture. Choose a shallow, attractive baking dish that can be put on the table, grease it with lard and lay in the faggots, side by side, touching. Add the stock, or gravy. They will need 40 minutes to an hour in a moderate oven. Half way through pour off all the juice into the basin containing the juice from the first cooking. Stand in cold water, or put in the fridge, so that the fat rises and can be skimmed off; add the fat-free gravy to the dish five minutes before serving.
Faggots are very good-tempered too, provided you cook them slowly. The heat can always be raised at the end if they need further browning. You can eat them cold, sliced like the Provençal gayettes; or reheat them under a lid of silver foil.
Like crépinettes or sausages, you can keep them for weeks, without a refrigerator, by putting them in a clean dish after they are cooked, and covering them with melted lard to a depth of half an inch. A sort of confits, in other words, like:
Goose, Duck, or Turkey Neck Sausage (Cou d’Oie, de Canard, or de Dinde Farci)
Buy your bird with the head on, or get the butcher to cut off the head just under the beak. Feel where the neck ends in the breast, and cut it off there. With the aid of a sharp knife, you will find it quite easy to strip the skin carefully off the flesh and vertebrae so that you end up with a tube. Alternatively you can slit the skin from top to bottom, so that you end up with a rough rectangle of skin.
Make a sausage-meat to fit the occasion—either very simple, or with pistachio nuts, or truffles and foie-gras–and stuff the neck. Tie it at both ends. Any scraps of meat from the neck can go in the sausage-meat, scraps of ham and so on. If you have a rectangle, not a tube of skin, you lay the sausage-meat on it, and perhaps put the creature’s liver in the middle, completely enclosed by sausage-meat. Sew the skin back into sausage shape with needle and button thread.
In France, on farms in the south-west, this stuffed neck would be cooked in goose fat with the rest of the bird, to go into the pot of confits d’oie, but for most people, it is more convenient to poach the sausage in stock, very gently, for 40 minutes. Let it cool in the stock, dry and slice for an hors d’œuvre. A very successful Christmas Eve or Boxing Night supper dish, but don’t forget to remove the thread just before you slice it.
SMALL FRESH SAUSAGES
(Saucisses de Porc)
Assuming that you have an electric mixer with a sausage-making attachment (or else a cooperative butcher, who will fill the skins for you with your own mixture), it is the easiest thing in the world to make good sausages. Three things to remember—try to get meat from what is called ‘overweight pig’, most pork on sale nowadays is from very young pigs bred for tender, lean, and rather tasteless meat, so tell the butcher that you want something a little older and with more flavour; keep a high proportion of fat in the mixture, at least a quarter of the total weight of meat, and in some cases a half; and don’t add cereals, rusk, or breadcrumbs if you can help it, anyway never more than one tenth of the total weight of lean and fat meat together.
Skins, prepared from sheep and beef guts, are to be obtained from any butcher who makes his own sausages. They are preserved in salt, and will keep that way indefinitely. When you want to make some sausages, take a length or two and soak them overnight. Next day push one end of the length over the tap and run cold water through, wrinkle them on to the sausage-making attachment and there you are. Don’t fill the skins too tightly or they’ll burst, even if you prick them with a fork, when they are fried. Hanging them up in a cool, dry place for two days is also a good idea–this gives them a chance to mature, as you will see if you try eating some immediately and some two days later.
All-meat sausages are naturally much less stodgy to eat, and make a great difference to dishes like cassoulet, home-baked beans and pork sausages, sausage rolls or toad-in-the-hole, where the accompaniments are on the hefty side. Saucisse en brioche would be impossibly doughy with an English-style sausage, which habitually contains one-third of its weight in cereals. If you have some sausage-meat over, prepare a chou farci.
Even if you aren’t provided with a refrigerator or a deep freeze, you can keep sausages in lard, like the confits described further. Sauté them gently in a little lard until they are a good golden colour, pack them into sterilized stoneware pots or large bottling jars and cover them with melted lard to a depth of at least half an inch above the highest sausage. When the lard has solidified, cover with silver foil or seal. Crépinettes can be kept in the same way, for weeks, even months, in a cool dry place. When you want to use them, stand the pots or jars in a very slow oven until the lard is melted. In theory you can remove the few sausages you require, push down the rest, and leave the lard to solidify again. But in practice, I prefer to use a whole pot at once—which means more pots and more lard. Incidentally the flavour of sausages kept in this way will be much better than the flavour of sausages kept in a deep-freeze. As the preserved sausages are already cooked, they will need only the briefest frying to make sure that they are thoroughly heated inside and crisped up on the outside.
SAUSAGE RECIPES
Any of the mixtures given under Sausage-Meat and Sausages Without Skins can be used.
Saucisses de Campagne
These country sausages are very good in cassoulets, or in thick cabbage soups (potées, or garbures) which are very popular in the French countryside in winter, being a complete meals in themselves (recipes).
Ideally you need beef intestines for the skins, but most of us have to make do with the usual sheep guts. Anyway, ask for the widest sausage skins possible, not chipolata ones.
1 lb. lean pork, neck or shoulder
½ lb. hard back fat
½ gill red wine (2-3 oz.)
1 level tablespoon salt
¼ teaspoon granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon each pepper and spices (quatre-épices)
A good pinch saltpetre
Mince the meat, not too finely, and add the wine, saltpetre and seasonings. Fill the skins, twisting them every six to eight inches. Hang them in a dry, airy place (60°F.) for 5 days in cold weather, 3 days in cool but mild weather, and only 2 days in hot or very damp weather. (They will, in fact, keep in a really cool place, once dried, for several weeks.)
If you want to vary the seasonings, you could use savory, tarragon, garlic, thyme, wild thyme, chives, bay leaf, coriander, sweet marjoram, shallots, crushed juniper berries, parsley, pimento, sage. Anything, in fact, that appeals to you.
Poach these sausages or stock in simmering water for quarter of an hour. If you are making a hearty vegetable soup, add them 20 minutes before the end. Remember to prick the sausages well before you put them in the hot liquid.
Saucisses de Toulouse
This is the famous sausage cooked in with cassoulet; it is also good with a hot potato salad, after brushing with melted butter and grilling, or simmering in water for ten minutes.
1½ lb. lean pork (neck or shoulder)
½ lb. hard back fat
Level tablespoon salt
Level tablespoon granulated sugar (scant)
1 pinch white pepper
1 pinch saltpetre
The distinguishing characteristic of this sausage is its coarsely chopped meat—mincing is too fine. Mix in the seasonings, and leave overnight in a dish with a lid, a pyrex casserole is ideal. Next day stir the ingredients up well and fill the skins, using the very large-holed plate of an electric mincer with the sausage-making attachment. They are ready for use, but to my mind improve with keeping a day or two.
Elizabeth David suggests stiffening them by dipping into boiling water for a few moments, before frying or grilling. This is a good idea.
Saucisses au Foie de Porc
This is a heavier sausage, more like a black pudding. It goes well, too, with apple purée, or apple rings lightly fried in butter.
1 lb. leg of pork, salted in brine for 3 days
1 lb. pig’s liver
1 lb. hard back fat
½ lb. onions, chopped and melted in butter
Heaped tablespoon of salt
Teaspoon each of black pepper and qualre-épices
2 oz. kirsch (Alsatian or German-Swiss kirschwasser)
Mince the liver two or three times, until you get a virtual purée. Put the lean and fat pork twice through the mincer. Mix in the cooked onions, which should have been reduced to a mash, and the other seasonings and kirsch. Hang in a cool, airy place for two whole days, then poach in very hot, but not boiling water, for an hour. Prick them with a needle as they rise to the surface. Drain well, leave to cool, then fry lightly in butter, or grill.
Saucisses d’Alsace-Lorraine
2 lb. lean pork (shoulder)
1 lb. hard back fat
1 heaped tablespoon salt (1 oz.)
A pinch of ground ginger
½ teaspoon each pepper, sugar, quatre-épices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, pepper)
Good pinch saltpetre
Mince the meat and fat, season, and fill the skins. These are Christmas-time sausages, and the chains are tied together at each end to form a circle, once you have twisted the sausages into 4-inch lengths. Dry them in an airy place (60°F.), hanging from a hook, for twenty-four hours. If you want to continue the festive tradition, brush a third of them with caramelized sugar or edible red colouring, and wrap the rest in silver and gold foil. Hang them on the Christmas tree, on Christmas Eve. Eat them for Christmas night supper, simmered in stock or lightly fried, with a hot potato salad, or potato purée.
Saucisses de Périgord
A more elegant festival sausage.
1 lb. lean pork
¾ lb. hard back fat
Level tablespoon salt
½ teaspoon each pepper, mixed spices or quatre-épices, sugar
2 oz. dry white wine
Up to 2 oz. truffles
Mince the meat, mix in the rest of the ingredients and stir well. Leave a day in a covered dish for the ingredients to blend their flavours well together, then fill the skins.
Saucisses au Champagne
The charcuterie textbooks say that this sausage, the finest of them all, should be made from the still-warm, freshly-killed pig, so that the champagne can be really well absorbed. You must scald the mincer and basin, too, so that the meat won’t lose temperature before you amalgamate it with the champagne.
It is excellent made with butcher’s meat, for a special occasion.
1½ lb. lean meat from the shoulder or leg
1½ lb. hard back fat
1 heaped tablespoon salt (1 oz.)
1 level teaspoon quatre-épices
5 oz. truffles
½ bottle champagne
3 new-laid eggs
1 level teaspoon white pepper
Mince the meat finely, two or three times. Mix in all the seasonings, except the truffles, and stir in the champagne gradually. Finally add the truffles. Put into chipolata skins, twisting every six inches. Leave in a cool place, not a refrigerator, for two days to mature.
Melt some butter in a heavy pan, and fry the sausages gently to a golden brown.
SMOKED SAUSAGES
(Saucisses Fumées)
Unlike the saucissons secs, the first four recipes require only a slight smoking, for flavour rather than preservation, so it would be all right to use the Abu Smoking Box which gives no more—be warned—than a smoky taste and appearance. Alternatively if you want to experiment with proper smoking, say in an old farmhouse fireplace, or by means of a trench and crate (William Heptinstall’s method, described in Hors d'œuvre and Cold Table, Faber & Faber, though not altogether adequately from a complete novice’s point of view), sausages are a good way of starting as they are reasonable to make.
And of course you can always eat the sausages without smoking them. If you have an Aga, leave them hanging nearby to dry out, provided the temperature never rises above 70°F.; 60°F. is the ideal. This is quite successful with chorizos, a red peppery sausage of Spanish origin, but very popular in France, particularly in the south-west, as you would expect, where it is added to thick vegetable soups (garbures) and cassoulet, or served, after 15 minutes simmering, with a purée of chick peas. The peppery seasonings can be varied to taste:
Chorizos
1 lb. lean pork, neck or shoulder
½ lb. hard back fat
½ gill red wine (2-3 oz.)
1 level tablespoon salt
¼ teaspoon granulated sugar
A good pinch saltpetre
1 whole red sweet pepper, on the small side, and 1 small chili
¼ teaspoon spices
¼ teaspoon Cayenne pepper
1 large clove of garlic, crushed
Cut the pepper and chili in half, remove all the seeds carefully as well as the stalk and put through the mincer (coarse plate) with the lean and fat pork. Add the rest of the ingredients, and fill wide sausage skins (1 inch diameter), twisting every five to six inches. Smoke lightly, or dry above the stove, at a temperature between 60° and 70°F., overnight.
Saucisses Espagnoles
1 lb. lean pork
1 lb. hard back fat
1 level tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon quatre-épices
½ small sweet red pepper, crushed, or ½ teaspoon Cayenne pepper
1½ oz. raisins, chopped
Mince the meat, add the crushed pepper, seasonings, and chopped raisins. Fill the skins, twisting at four to five inch lengths, and smoke lightly. Use in the same ways as chorizos.
Saucisses Viennoises (from Vienne, Isère, not Vienna, Austria)
½ lb. lean pork
½ lb. veal
½ lb. fillet steak
1 level tablespoon salt
½ teaspoon each Cayenne pepper, saltpetre, and coriander
¾ pint warm water
Mince the meat as finely as possible—twice through the machine at least. Add the seasonings and the warm water, stirring it in bit by bit. Fill wide, 1 inch diameter, sausage skins (beef skins are the ideal), smoke quickly and simmer for ten minutes in water just on the boil. Prick with a fine needle as the sausages rise to the surface. Eat with a hot potato salad, dressed with a horse-radish flavoured vinaigrette.
Saucisses Allemandes (Saucisses d’Augsbourg)
2 lb. lean pork, from the neck
½ lb. hard back fat, or green back bacon fat Good pinch of saltpetre
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon quatre-épices, or mixed cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves
1 rounded tablespoon salt
Mince the pork coarsely, season it, and finally add the back fat or green bacon fat cut in very small dice—about ⅛ to ¼ inch, chopped rather than diced perhaps, but as regularly as possible. Fill the skins, and dry at a temperature of about 60°F. for four days, in an airy place. Smoke them lightly and quickly, then simmer for 15–30 minutes (according to the thickness of the sausage—beef skins, 1 inch diameter, are the best, but you may have to make do with the smaller sheep-gut skins).
If you are experienced in smoking meat, you might like to try these two sausages which are so popular in north-eastern France. Frankfurters are well-known in this country, but not the cumin-flavoured saucisses croquantes, though some delicatessens sell them under their German name Knackwurst:
Saucisses au Cumin, or Croquantes
1½ lb. lean pork from shoulder or neck
1 lb. lean beef
½ lb. hard back fat
2 slightly rounded tablespoons salt
2 large cloves of garlic, crushed to pulp with a little salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons chopped red pepper
Scant teaspoon saltpetre
2 oz. cumin seeds, crushed in the mortar
The beef has to be minced very finely indeed, and seasoned with a little salt and the saltpetre; then the pork (lean and fat) has to be minced not quite so finely. Mix everything together very thoroughly, with an electric beater if possible, so that you can add 8 oz. of cold water gradually, whilst the meat is being stirred round.
Fill the skins, twisting them into four or five inch sausages. Smoke them for two days, after drying them in an airy place (60°F.) for two to five days according to the temperature and the humidity. They can be kept in a very cool larder for some time.
When you want to cook them, put them into a pan of cold water and bring them slowly to the boil, or rather to the simmer. Leave for five minutes, then serve—if you are not quite ready, take the pan off the heat, but leave the sausages in the water to keep them hot.
Saucisses de Francfort, or de Strasbourg
1½ lb. shoulder and leg of pork, salted in brine 3 days if possible
1 lb. hard back fat
1 heaped tablespoon of salt
1 heaped teaspoon white pepper and coriander (A tiny pinch of saltpetre, if the meat is unsalted)
1 scant teaspoon of mace (or nutmeg and cinnamon mixed)
Mince the meat twice—the first time fairly coarsely, then add the seasonings, mince again with a finer plate. Stir it well, whilst adding 8 oz. of cold water—an electric beater, at a low speed, is ideal for this part of the operation.
Separate the skins into lengths between a foot and a foot and a half; fill the skins, tie them at each end and twist them in the middle, to make two long thin sausages each.
Hang them up to dry in a cool, airy place, where the temperature is about 60°F. at the most. Leave them for a whole day, then smoke them for eight hours. If timing is awkward, leave them to dry for a longer rather than a shorter time. Eight hours smoking should be enough to produce the deep, tawny brown Frankfurter colour.
You can keep them for several weeks. To cook, lower them into water at the simmer and leave for ten minutes. After that time, draw the pan to one side to keep the sausages hot. Traditionally they are served with choucroute, or a hot potato salad.
LARGE SAUSAGES
(Saucissons)
On a row of hooks in the charcuterie, above the small, fresh sausages, the boudins blancs, and the boudins noirs, hang the medium-sized saveloy-type saucissons, for boiling and eating hot or cold. Beside them are ranged the very large keeping sausages (saucissons secs), which the charcutier sometimes makes himself, but which are usually supplied from a factory, as they are to delicatessen shops in this country. They are easy to recognize, meshed in string, wrapped in gold, silver and coloured foils, and cheerfully labelled. Like the fresh sausage, they must be all meat, predominantly pork—if horse-meat, for instance, is used, the label must say so. The more unfamiliar, black-skinned andouilles or large tripe sausages, hang with them, slicing to a greyish-brown, beautifully marbled surface.
You can buy these sausages whole, for storing from hooks in your own larder, and in miniature for modern, small-family convenience, but mostly they are sold in slices, by weight. Eat them as they are, with hunks of bread and butter; olives go well too and can be bought at most charcuteries. A good picnic idea is to heat through some garlic sausage (saucisson à l’ail) and a piece of petit salé (cooked, pickled pork), with a large tin of pork and beans french-style (cassoulet).
In town charcuteries you will often find a variety of regional, national and international saucissons. Forget about the ones you know. Buy 50 grams (just under 2 oz.) of as many as you can afford—if they are well wrapped, then re-wrapped after the picnic, they will survive days of heat and car-travel in good condition. Often there will be local names, so point and don’t lose heart. French pabietec is endless in matters of food, even in busy shops. Explain that you would like to make an hors d’œuvre of as many kinds of saucisson as possible, particularly les spécialités de la région. One name that we always remember is gendarme, given to flat, strappy, yellow and brown speckled sausages in the Jura.
Buying saucissons in small quantities, whilst coping simultaneously with decimal weights and currency, one is only dimly aware of the high cost per pound. With an all-meat sausage you expect to pay more, but in the case of saucissons secs there is inevitably a good deal of shrinkage in the processes of drying and maturing, which pushes the price up higher still.
To make these sausages at home, you need skins made from the large intestine. If you have a farmhouse kitchen, with a solid fuel stove and plenty of old hooks attached to the beams, you are well away because the saucissons need to be dried at a temperature of 60°F., and a steady temperature at that. You can store them in a cooler larder when the drying is completed, but once again they should hang so that air circulates all round them. Avoid a steamy humid atmosphere.
As well as the right physical conditions, you need patience too because this type of sausage needs at least a month in which to mature, whether or not it is smoked; some kinds need six months. They will be covered with white powdery flowers from about the sixth day: ‘cette fleur est constituée par des micro-organismes de la famille des levures, qui préparent le climat idéal pour le développement d’autres microbes qui feront subir à la viande la transformation voulue d’onctuosité et de goût.’ In other words, leave the white organism alone to do its work of maturing the sausage. Don’t worry if the sausage shrinks, it will lose up to 40 per cent of its weight.
Saucisson Cuit au Madère
Here first of all is a large sausage that is neither dried nor smoked—in consequence it will not keep very long. Let it mature for two days, then eat it within seven days.
1 lb. good lean pork (fillet)
½ lb. hard back fat
1 oz. Madeira (2 tablespoons, or a liqueur glass)
2 oz. truffles (optional)
8–10 pistachio nuts, blanched
1 heaped tablespoon of salt
Pinches of white pepper, and spices, preferably quatre-épices
Mince the meat as finely as possible, two or three times. Season after the first time with salt and spices, then put through the machine again. Finally stir in the Madeira, the chopped truffles and the pistachio nuts.
Put into a nice piece of large intestine, tie each end. Wrap it in a fine muslin and tie it once again, like a parcel, not just at each end.
Simmer for three-quarters of an hour, then hang it up to cool and dry. Tighten up the string and the cloth, and store in an airy place. Like the other saucissons, this one is sliced finely and served as an hors d’œuvre.