Out of curiosity, what do the walnuts do for the dish? It looks like it would taste good without them, but since I am Not a Nut Fan I don't know if they do anything to the end result other than adding nuts.

A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.

Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught -
Love, laughter, or mourning - remembrance of rapture or fear -
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.

As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.

that particular sausage was made from burnt pork, i believe.

Burnt or not, that's pretty impressive.

TNH @ 3:

Thank you. Since the recipe looks so good anyway, I'll have to try it with the walnuts.

no, no--the real author's name is alluded to in my final line. if you know a bit about roundel's it's not even concealed.

The roundel ends as it begins; we take
The first words from the first line, where it bends
Easily, and with the refrain we make
The roundel ends.

--But not just yet; its rhyming still extends
Through six new lines before they come awake
Again, those last few words, those sleeping friends

We started out with and will not forsake;
What though the weary journey's way one wends,
When it is finally time to take a break
The roundel ends.

my cooking chops the work-day clean in two.
i close my laptop; soon the humming stops.
i shuffle to the kitchen, and review
my cooking chops

first: peeling, coring, and removing tops;
then boning, trimming fatty residue,
and heating olive oil until it pops.

the cutlet’s poised above the searing dew,
a timid bather: briskly in it hops,
and hops back out again. with that, it’s through:
my cooking chops.

Pour the mushroom soaking liquid through a cheapo paper coffee filter and discard the grit that will get caught in the filter. This is a common problem with mushrooms -- the grit isn't always dirt, it's sometimes spores, but regardless it hurts the texture of whatever one is cooking.

That's a good trick whenever one is rehydrating something, like dried chiles; I even keep conical filters around that fit my kitchen funnel set. It helps that I dry my own chiles, too...

Then again, I've never noticed it hurting the texture. With chiles one of the things the solids provide is the thickening properties, so I run them through the spice mills, and use them whole. If I need to keep the placental tissues out, I split them up first, be the bought in bulk, or grown at home.

Maybe I'll put it together the night before one of our Renaissance Festival weekends, put it in a crock pot and transport it for our day's feasting. (and make all the patrons passing come into the shop because of the good smells...)

I've done a similar recipe--chief differences being vegan sausage or eggplants instead of meat sausage. And pine nuts instead of walnuts. I've got a Prejudice against walnuts.

I know that baking can require a *bit* more ... arithmetic -- and not that I'm afraid of arithmetic. But I do love improvisation, serendipity, and adventure.

I own more strainers and filters than most people would think sane. My Christmas present from Patrick two or three years back was a vacuum-operated labware filtration setup. I can't imagine cooking without strainers. On the other hand, I also can't imagine mushroom spores

(One of the minor dissatisfactions of our current apartment is that two out of three of my biggest strainers (the one with the three-foot wooden handle, and the conical one that has a separate tripod to support it) are permanently on duty in the laundry area downstairs, where they keep the laundry sink from stopping up and flooding when the washing machine drains into it. The third, my big metal colander, was for a time assigned to sit upside-down over the back yard storm drain to keep it from getting clogged with leaves during thunderstorms, though it's been replaced by a purpose-built strainer-box rigged up by our landlord. This is what I get for moving to a planet where it rains.)

Paula: those little handmade orrechiette you can get in some groceries would be impeccably in-period.

When I was still living in Australia I couldn't see the point of saffron. The stuff under that name in the supermarkets produced yellow, with the little orange threads, but there was no scent or flavour at all. The real thing must have been available, because cookbook authors seemed to be able to find it, but I don't know how. [I think things have improved since then.]

The real thing, of course, is glorious, and one of the many reasons for trying to keep relatively tolerant relations with Iran.

Saffron in iced tea, anyone?

Is this a ricer doing double-duty? Add a wooden pestle, and it's a perfect description of Hilde's old family ricer. (From her grandmother, as I recall.)

At first glance, the list of ingredients seemed like something from a random recipe generator. Kale? AND walnuts? AND mushrooms? Huh. Now I'll have to try making it.

For future recipes, could you perhaps recreate the recipe for that Duke's Mixture you made for Hilde and me umpty-ump years ago? Best apple-pie seasoning, ever. I was bereft when the jar finally ran out. (Well, maybe not bereft. Definitely pensive, though.)

They are sweet, as compared to similar sausages, with pepper flakes.

We use them on pizza, etc. They are a decent breakfast sausage, but tend (to me) to be a bit much in quantity.

I suspect they are actually a New York sausage, from the immigrant community.

In fact, I didn't think the old potato ricers were conical until I found that antique listed. It's probably harder to use as a ricer than as a strainer.

We're talking sausages, not salami, right?

Sorry!

Pork-based salami with fennel (usually labelled 'finocchiona') is available from many delicatessens, but fennel isn't the default for salami.

However, a quick Google suggests that this "sweet" sausage doesn't have sugar or any other sweeteners in it, so maybe not so disgusting:

ITALIAN SWEET SAUSAGE

5 lbs. venison
1 lb. pork fat or beef suet
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 bay leaves, finely crumbled
2 tbsp. chopped parsley
2 tbsp. basil
1 tbsp. salt
1 tbsp. pepper
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. thyme

Sausages I am used to seeing as that style are a coarse-ground, pork sausage, with moderate fat. The critical ingredient is fennel.

Here is a list of ingredients for one:

* 2 tablespoons salt
* 3 teaspoons fennel seed
* 2 teaspoons sugar
* 1 tablespoon crushed hot pepper
* 1 teaspoon caraway seed
* 3 teaspoons coriander
* 5 pounds coarse ground pork butt
* 1 cup dry red wine
* 3 cloves garlic, crushed

The sugar strikes me as needless, the caraway as normal. The coriander as acceptable, but not usual, the wine optional.

Ricci's Italian Sausage Company (in Pennsylvania) has this to say: . .A word about the Ricci's Italian sausage family tradition. When we say Italian sausage - we mean Italian sausage. When my grandfather made Italian sausage, he didn't use turkey or chicken. In "The Rocks," we only use pork and never any "designer" spices. Since we are from Abruzzo - our sweet Italian sausage has crushed black pepper, NO fennel, and please, NO garlic! Our hot Italian sausage is Calabria style with paprika, red crushed pepper and fennel. We make our sausage with just the right amount of fat - it's not greasy and it's not dry.

And I have found a general description.

I think of it as a pork sausage that includes fennel in the spices, as opposed to quatre-epices, or sage and pepper, or garlic and woodsmoke.

But it is a sausage, right?

But the mention of fennel makes me ask (at the risk of derailing the discussion) what this particular herb has to do with homosexuality in Italian.

And we have a wonderful Italian community in Kansas City. I have five or six locally made brands of italian sausage to choose from. Mendolia's is my favorite.

And the spicy sausage is usually just on the edge of being a bit too hot for me. When we get Italian sausage for summer grilling (or winter cooking) I always make sure I've got some sweet as well as hot.

I was also wondering, and you provoked me into consulting The Google. It directed me to this, which is based on this (in Italian).

Giovanni Dall'Orto's opinion, based on plausible looking sources, is that it comes from an older use of 'finocchio' meaning 'worthless'.

By the way, looking at all that Italian makes me think that the title for Teresa's original post is missing an 'h' and should be Pasta e fagioli thinghi.

John VP, not to worry. I get misspelled a lot.

Baking might imaginably require math under one or another rare circumstance, but don't let Michael Ruhlman scare you. I've been baking for decades, and I'm middling dysnumeric.

Thomas @42: Done!

In fact there is a challah dough waiting in the fridge for me to bake before going to Lawrence for Mother's day (yikes, that's today! need to go to bed!!!).

'Up Noort where I come from we love our sausages, which are full of nice pork fat and uncracked black pepper and little else that I know of, but my Sicilian ex-boyfriend was first deeply dismayed and then disgusted when he tasted them. Partly because of the absence of fennel and partly because to him they were horribly greasy.

I miss Sicilian sausages. Like many things Sicilian, they might well be easier to find in New York than in the North of Italy.

Of course there will be drift in this kind of preparation, but Italians are so deeply conservative that it is completely possible that three centuries from now they'll be making the exact same kind of sausages in NYC.

If we will be making them in Italy, that's a different question.

not entirely clear why, but when linguistic groups travel geographically from a core, the furthest dispersed groups tend to preserve more archaic features of the language, where the speakers at the core continue to innovate.

perhaps the center of the pot keeps boiling, so to speak, where the edges cool and harden.

anyhow, if you want to know how indo-european was spoken in its homeland, you'll find better clues in ireland and in india than you will in armenia (using that as a plausible guess among controversial competitors).

italian may lose some of its food traditions. but only because they are innovating so fearlessly, and creating the next traditions. and because they won't put up with anyone looking over their shoulder and saying, 'that's not authentic.'

"so i visited my cousins? in peoria? and they were talking like people talked in the san fernando, like, twenty years ago! and i was just like, whatever! valspeak is so totally 1985!"

kid bitzer #48: Rather like the way rural Jamaicans in the 1970s still said "peraventure" for "perhaps", when that had long dropped out of standard use.

When the US troops got to Italy, they were thought funny, because they were speaking Italian which was out of date; it was the Italian of the times of emigration.

Part of it is lack of mass, part of it is the insularity of an out group, and part of it is the problem of active use.

It's just an envelope of gelatin, which is typically used to make the liquids thicken up a bit, nothing more. It's not jello with sausage in it.

Terry Karney @ 52:

In some cases there's probably also a hint of tradition as well. This is our historical language, and we'd better not change it out of respect for where we came from, or some similar line of thinking. Of course, there will be innovations anyway, because languages do change.

In my experience, food names are some of the most variable even within what is supposedly the same language.

"peradventure"? really? i would have had an instant idiolect-crush on the first person i heard say that.

a misplaced one, of course, and soon repented of when i heard everyone else saying it, too.

but still--it sounds so courtly.

about the mechanism for peripheral conservatism--all of these suggestions seem plausible, but i don't know that anyone has a good handle on the phenomenon. it has to operate over very long times and very long distances, which makes some of the explanations via overt psychologizing ("and then the tasmanians said to themselves: "we may be a long way from new guinea, but we're still new guineans at heart!"") less plausible. johanna nichol's book "linguistic diversity in space and time" is the place to learn more.

she has shockingly little to say in it about sweet sausages and the use of fennel, however.

So my pasta fagioli is more tomato-looking, but I love it anyway.

I have tried and failed. It is possible in Seattle [after all, the climate and latitude are similar to Saffron Walden] but it really does need full sun, which in my case I do not have.

This seems to be true of all the autumn-flowering crocus species. The spring-flowering ones tolerate quite a bit of shade, and just flower later, but the autumn ones end up not flowering at all in my garden.

Hooray, and more recipes, please.

One of the things which is painful about being in Tennessee is rosemary is no longer ubiquitous. At home it's a weed. Here it's a pricey herb.

I could go and collect a couple of bushel, at random, from public planters, and not leave any of them visibly depleted.

Here, not so much.