Sausage gravy- was Re: [Sca-cooks] gravy

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach <jenne at fiedlerfamily.net>:
>  > >The second was one that I had been aware of, but had thought was an
>>  >aberration until I was discussing it with Adamantius. In this one, you cook
>>  >the sausage, then remove it from the pan, make a roux with the fat and the
>>  >flour, add the milk and the sausage, and heat through. This one 
>>makes a much
>>  >darker gravy, but should still be in the tan range. Have I got your method
>>  >right, A?
>>
>>  What I normally do is a little more like your third method. I may
>>  have done something like the second as a result of feeling a little
>>  uncomfortable about just sprinkling flour into liquid. The fat is
>>  there anyway, and in good sausage it's not a huge amount of fat, so
>>  where's the harm in using it, and the finished product seems to be
>>  almost completely indistinguishable from the stuff made in the more
>>  traditional way.
>
>That, by the way, is the way that the Great Sausage Gravy Cooks of
>Eisental all make it (except for Sarah bas Mordechai, who does an
>excellent job with a different version, which involves throwing away the
>drippings and making a white sauce with butter, flour and milk). I had to
>make Sausage Gravy for last year's Landsknecht breakfast and rather than
>trying it myself, I turned some of the oldest-inhabitant cooks loose in
>the kitchen to make the stuff while I fried and moved stuff around.
>
>Note:  they normally use sweet Italian sausage, and I agree that with this
>method, plain or breakfast sausage -- which we had on hand-- made too
>bland a gravy. We had to add seasonings to help it along. We encountered a
>born Southerner who insisted that plain or breakfast sausage would be the
>ONLY possible choice, but that seems to work better with the white-sauce
>version.

I had heard a rumor one year that sweet Italian sausage was the only 
kind they could find in bulk on the day, and that it became sort of 
an Eisental tradition. I admit it's not my favorite way to do it, but 
I suspect that if one has the mentality to come up with sausage gravy 
in the first place ;-), Italian fennel sausage is a relatively small 
obstacle.

Since we're making embarrassing admissions (okay, _you're_ not, I'm 
just teasing you), I confess to recently having made sausage gravy 
with plain, unseasoned, relatively lean ground pork, seasoning it in 
the pan with a fair amount of salt, lots of black pepper, a pinch of 
cayenne and a tiny bit of sage. It worked surprisingly well, but it's 
a bit of a jar to actually have to physically add an equivalent 
amount of salt to get the flavor similar to what it'd be if you used 
your typical bulk, plain sausage.

Adamantius