Recipes

Proof the humble sausage owns a dinner-party gear

In French bistros they've been braising sausages with lentils for about as long as anyone can remember — saucisses aux lentilles, the dinner of farmers and philosophers alike. Browned sausages finish cooking nestled into herby green lentils, feeding every drop of their juices back into the pot, and a spoon of Dijon at the end pulls the whole thing into line. It's humble food with quiet polish, and it proves the sausage pack can do a great deal more than the barbecue asks of it.

The casing trick that makes the fastest ragu you'll ever cook

Here's a trick worth knowing: a good sausage is really just seasoned beef in a jacket. Slip the casings off, break the meat into a hot pan, and you've got instant, ready-flavoured meatballs for a tomato sauce that tastes like it simmered all afternoon — in the time it takes the rigatoni to boil. This is the fastest genuinely impressive pasta in our kitchen, and it starts with the pack that's already in every beef share.

Winter comfort with a golden potato lid

A hotpot is the casserole that brings its own lid — thin slices of potato overlapped like roof tiles, brushed with butter and baked until golden. Underneath, chunks of beef sausage braise slowly in an oniony gravy until the whole pot smells like a country pub in July. It's one dish, it's mostly hands-off, and it turns the sausage pack from the fallback dinner into the one everyone asks about. Worth lighting the fire for, if you've got one.

The bangers and mash your family didn't know they were missing

Sausages have a reputation as humble food. But humble doesn't mean simple, and it certainly doesn't mean without flavour — especially when you're starting with grass-fed beef sausages made from animals that ate what cattle are supposed to eat. This is a recipe that takes about an hour — most of it hands-off — and earns the kind of silence at the dinner table that means everyone is too busy eating to talk.