Making an Egg Sausage (part 1) -- Another Transylvanian cookbook recipe

It is time to pick a recipe from the Transylvanian Prince's Cookbook!

This is the digital translation of a book in Hungarian that I have tried recipes from before.  Here is the book reference:

The Prince of Transylvania’s court cookbook 

From the 16th century 

THE SCIENCE OF COOKING

You can find a copy of it here:
 http://www.fibergeek.com/leathernotebook/files/2018/05/Transylvanian-Cookbook-v3.pdf

The recipes I have tried are here:  Prince of Transylvania's court cookbook

Today I picked recipe number 44, found on page 11.


Cow intestines stuffed with sweet milk. 

Wash the intestines so that they will not smell; you will need sweet milk, eggs, saffron, black pepper, but mostly eggs. Mix these together, this is the stuffing. Add some parsley leaves to the milk, tie the two ends of the intestines so that the stuffing won’t leak. Poach it in hot water so that the milk will get dry like a liver. If you’re cooking it, cook it in another pot of clean water, once cooked, pass the water through a strainer, pass some sweet milk through a strainer on top of it, put some parsley leaves on it and cook it like that. Add some saffron half an hour before serving it, add some black pepper and salt.

My Redaction

The idea is that this is a sausage that is filled with an egg/milk mixture.  When I first read it I thought the filling should be like a stiff custard.  To make a custard, you use roughly 2 parts milk to 1 part egg, however the instructions say "mostly eggs", which made me think (as the translators noted) this should be more like scrambled eggs.  I struggled with this and so compromised by using roughly equal parts milk to egg.

This is my first time ever working with sausage casings (pig intestines, not cow) so I was a little nervous.  I asked my online friends who make salumi and used their experienced advice on how to poach it without overcooking it.

12 eggs (2 1/2 cups), well-beaten
3 cups milk
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely minced
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
saffron, ground in the mortar (see close up picture for quantity)

1 four foot and 1 two foot sausage casings (32 mm diameter), soaked and rinsed

This much saffron.

The sausage casings had to soak for nearly an hour, so while that was going on I put water in my big Dutch oven and put it over high heat with the cover on.  When it got to a boil, I turned the heat to low.

The four foot casing

The beaten eggs, milk, parsley, pepper, and saffron all went into a pitcher.  I saw that this liquid stuffing would be best poured into the casing and the pitcher made it easy to control the flow.  I noticed that the parsley and pepper floated to the top, so I kept a spoon handy and stirred it well just before each pouring.



Once the casings were ready, I slid them over the end of a funnel and tied a knot in the end.  I decided I would work over a bowl, just in case I lost my grip on the casings or there was a leak or other disaster.  It was really pretty easy to pour the egg mixture into the casing and allow the casing to slide off into the bowl.

The entire four foot casing fit over the tip!

The parsley and pepper floated to the top anyway.

When the first casing was full (the four foot one) and tied off, I realized I had about 1 1/2 cups of filling left, so I soaked the second casing.

I think it is pretty!

At this point I was ready to poach the sausage.  I brought the water back up to a boil, turned off the heat, put the sausage in, then put the lid on and set the timer for 20 minutes. At the halfway point, I turned the sausage over.

When the time was up, the sausage was firmer and lighter yellow in color.  I moved it into a bowl of ice water, as my salumi friends said it was best to poach it gently (as I did) and then shock it in the cold water.  I added more ice as needed to keep the water very cold and turned it over once.
It is obvious in these pictures that the parsley and some of the pepper floated to the top and the rest of the pepper sank to the bottom along the length of the sausage.

The "up" side

The "down" side

It took about 20 minutes until the sausage was cool to the touch.  Then I drained it and put it on a towel on a plate.  I put it into the refrigerator, uncovered, to dry and continue to cool overnight.



The second sausage was prepared just like the first, except it only took about 10 minutes in the ice water to get it cool to the touch.  I noticed that a lot of the pepper had sunk to the bottom of the pitcher, despite my attempts to keep it afloat with stirring.  It was hard to get it to go into the sausage casing.

Pre-poaching sausage number two.

This is the end of making the egg sausages.  Tune in tomorrow for part two, eating the sausages!