Tomato Sausages

Just a handful of our tomato glut

After an early but slow start to our tomato season back in May, the plants are in full production mode now, pumping out newly ripe tomatoes every day. We've done our best to stay on top of the onslaught with BLT sandwiches, Caprese salads, green salads, chopped salads, and pasta sauces. I've snacked on the little cherry tomatoes out of hand like they were candy. Just this weekend, we seemed finally ahead of the recent glut with just a few tomatoes left in the kitchen.

I even wondered, as I put the finishing touches on an article Friday, whether there were enough tomatoes to use in a salad for dinner that night. I shouldn't have worried.

From the back of the house I heard the door close and, a few seconds later, the gentle thud of a stainless steel bowl against the granite counter in the kitchen. Investigation revealed: more tomatoes. The huge mixing bowl couldn't even contain all the new harvest. Tomatoes overflowed onto the counter; little cherry tomatoes and fat, ribbed Brandywines, bigger than my fist, all ready to go. Others were lined up, not quite ripe enough, but near enough to bring them inside before squirrels feast on them.

What the hell will I do with all these? More and more — and more — tomatoes every day. Then I remembered a short recipe from an old manual in the library that uses tomatoes and finely crushed crackers to augment fresh pork sausages.

The red paste of tomato pulp and crackers is an example of a panade: bread mixed with milk, stock, or other another liquid. The technique is common for making meatballs, meatloaf, and a variety of sausages, helping them remain moist after cooking — and add a bit of flavor.

I don't usually make sausage in the summer, but this may be just the recipe that'll inspire me to haul my stuffer down from the attic to inaugurate the coming of Autumn.

From A. W. Fulton's 1902 Home Pork Making, here's

Tomato Sausages 

Add one and one-half pounds pulp of choice ripe tomatoes to every seven pounds of sausage meat, using an addition of one pound of finely crushed crackers, the last named previously mixed with a quart of water and allowed to stand for some time before using. Add the mixture of tomato and cracker powder gradually to the meat while the latter is being chopped. Season well and cook thoroughly.

Goes well with:

• My hearty recommendation of Maynard Davies' Manual of a Bacon Curer.  If you even think you may try your hand at making bacon, the book is a must-have.
• And speaking of bacon, here's my recipe for bacon dumplings for a wicked hangover.
• Nigel Slater's recipe for a smooth and creamy pâté. 
• And then there's my take on Jennifer McLagan's book Odd Bits with its recipe for brain fritters.  Written almost two years ago, its opening line is still a bit of a conversation stopper: "I have licked the inside of a dead man’s skull, yet cannot bring myself to eat brains." 

Sucking Weisswurst

Well, I'm not dumb

but I can't understand

why she walked like a woman 

but talked like a man.

Ray Davies 

Lola (1970)

This Spring, I'm spending time in Munich, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Preparation for that trip includes reading daily news from Germany and the Netherlands; watching Dutch and German films to get the rhythm of the languages again; and drawing up lists of specific spirits, foods, and antiquarian distilling and charcuterie books to track down. It was while reading Culinaria: Germany, though, that I was brought up short by a claim that simply strains credulity.

The entry concerns that Bavarian specialty weisswurst, a  sausage made of veal and typically eaten mid-morning with soft pretzels, mild mustard, and beer — not sauerkraut, as one might encounter in other parts of the world or even other regions of Germany. Should some tourist fail to ask for traditional accompaniments and order sauerkraut, the editor maintains,

A native Bavarian sitting nearby will either turn away in horror, or be quick to offer advice when, in addition, he sees the "foreigner" wielding a knife and fork, cutting the sausage up into small pieces. He will explain that the correct way to eat this sausage is to zuzeln it — a verb for which the foreigner, even if he is a German citizen, will search his dictionary in vain. It is a Bavarian dialect word meaning "suck," and describes the proper way to eat Weisswurst: you cut it in half with a knife, pick it up in your fingers, dip it in sweet mustard — no other kind will do — and suck it out of its skin. The experience is primeval and sensuous; it is no coincidence that "sucking" the sausage suggests associations with breast-feeding.

Now, I'm an historian and retired museum curator, not an eminent psychoanalist, but even I understand that international and cross-lingual jokes concerning sausages' phallic shape had been worked pretty hard long before the 19th-century supposed invention of weisswurst. Nor, it must be admitted, am I thoroughly versed in all the ins and outs of Bavarian culture, but to suggest that anyone happily sucking away at a juicy, fat white sausage is reliving infantile experiences of breast-feeding...well.

Sucking a weisswurst is primeval, as the text notes. It is sensuous. But ignoring an elephant of that magnitude in the room takes a special kind of denial.

Goes well with:

• Christine Metzger (2008) Culinaria: Germany. f. h. ullman. ISBN: 978-3-8331-1030-6. Amazon vendors sell the paperback for over $300. That's ridiculous; the hardback sells for under $30 here. 
• If you'd like to take a run at making your own weisswurst, Bernhard Gahm's 1998 German language book Würste, Sülzen, Pasteten selbstgemacht will set you right. If you prefer English-language instructions, try Rytek Kutas' cornerstone sausage-making book, Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing. Finally (and it's a bit pricey), multiple French versions of white sausage — boudin blanc —are presented in volume one of the Professional Charcuterie series by Marcel Cottenceau et al (Van Nostrand Reinland, 1991).