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Another Recipe for Sausage
Fifteen pounds of choice lean pork, seven pounds of fat, seven tablespoonfuls of salt, seven of sage, two and one-half of thyme, six of pepper and four of sweet marjoram. Mix the meat well with the seasoning; keep in a cool, dry place.
This is a bulk seasoning formula for fresh sausage meat, scaled for a farm hog-killing rather than a household. Everything hinges on ratio, so it scales down cleanly.
- Divide before you startThe full batch is 22 lb of meat. A fifth of it gives 3 lb lean pork, 1 lb 6 oz fat, and, in teaspoons rather than tablespoons: about 4 tsp salt, 4 tsp sage, 1 1/2 tsp thyme, 3 1/2 tsp pepper, 2 tsp marjoram.
- The cut"Choice lean pork" would most likely be trimmed shoulder or leg; the recipe does not say what the seven pounds of fat is, though back fat rather than soft belly or leaf fat suits the purpose. Boston butt on its own is somewhat leaner than this mix's 68/32, so it will give a slightly drier sausage if you cannot buy fat separately.
- Keep it cold while grindingMeat and fat should be near freezing and the grinder parts chilled. Warm fat smears rather than cuts, and smeared sausage cooks out greasy with a crumbly texture.
- Herb strength has changedSage in older recipes of this kind was often rubbed sage, which is fluffy and mild by volume. Modern ground sage is appreciably stronger spoon for spoon, so start at half the sage if that is what you have. The same broadly applies to ground thyme and marjoram against their leaf forms.
- Salt levelSeven tablespoons of table salt across 22 lb works out near 1.3 percent, which is right for fresh sausage. If you use coarse kosher salt, weigh rather than measure by spoon, or you will land well under.
- Test pattyFry a small patty before packing the batch. Seasoning is judged hot, and six tablespoons of black pepper is assertive by current tastes.
- Storage, not as written"A cool, dry place" meant a winter larder in an unheated house. This mix contains no cure and no nitrite, so it is fresh sausage: refrigerate at or below 40F and use within two days, or freeze. Cook to 160F throughout.
- YieldAbout 22 lb, or roughly 88 quarter-pound patties. Freeze in one-pound packets; seasoned sausage is best used up within a few months.
Recipes on this scale belong to the annual hog-killing, done in the first hard cold of late autumn or early winter when a farm family butchered one or two animals and had to deal with the whole carcass in a few days. Hams and bacon went into cure, lard was rendered, and the trim that suited neither became sausage, which is why the formula starts from fifteen pounds of lean and seven of fat rather than from a number of servings. The seasoning is the standard American breakfast blend, dominated by sage, with thyme and sweet marjoram alongside it. That such a quantity could simply be "kept in a cool, dry place" tells you the book still assumed a reader with an unheated pantry or springhouse and a cold season to work in.