Sausage Meat
To fifteen pounds of meat add four ounces of fine salt, one and a half ounces of pepper, one small teacup of sage, half a teacupful of summer savory.
This is a seasoning formula rather than a full method: it assumes you already have ground pork in front of you and only tells you what to put in it. The proportions are the useful part, and they scale cleanly.
- Scale it down firstFifteen pounds is a hog-butchering batch. Divide by ten for a workable 1.5 lb: about 11 g (2 tsp) fine salt, 4 g (1.5 tsp) ground black pepper, roughly 1 tbsp sage and 1.5 tsp summer savory.
- What the salt works out toFour ounces to fifteen pounds is about 1.7 percent by weight, which is squarely in the modern range for fresh sausage. Weigh rather than measure by volume; fine salt and coarse salt fill a spoon very differently.
- The teacupA period teacup is not a standard cup. Nineteenth-century sources vary, putting it somewhere in the range of about 4 to 6 fl oz, so a "small teacup" of sage is somewhere near half a cup of dried leaf or less. Dried herbs vary enormously in density, so start at the low end and adjust.
- The pepper is assertiveAn ounce and a half to fifteen pounds is roughly 0.6 percent by weight, well above what most modern sausage recipes call for. Season to half of it if you want a milder result.
- The meat itselfUnstated, because everyone knew: pork, and pork with fat on it. Aim for shoulder at roughly 70 to 75 percent lean. Leaner than that and the patties turn dry and crumbly no matter how well seasoned.
- Sage and savoryRubbed sage rather than the powdered kind is the likelier form here. Summer savory has largely dropped out of American spice racks but is still sold dried; thyme is the nearest substitute, used a little more sparingly.
- Test before committingMix the seasoning through the ground meat, fry a small patty, taste, and correct the whole batch. There is no other way to judge salt and sage levels in raw sausage.
- StorageThis is fresh sausage, not cured — there is no nitrite here and nothing that makes it shelf-stable. Refrigerate and use within two days, or freeze; cook to 160F.
Sausage meat recipes like this one belong to the annual hog killing, which in most American households happened in cold weather and produced far more fresh pork than a family could eat at once. The trimmings and scraps that were not worth curing as ham or bacon went through the grinder, and the book gives a bare ratio and no method at all. Sage is the defining flavor of American breakfast sausage and has long been so; summer savory, its frequent partner in older recipes, was a common kitchen-garden herb that has since faded from general use in the United States while remaining a fixture in parts of Atlantic Canada and continental Europe. The recipe calls for a teacup measure rather than the standardized cup that Fannie Farmer had been pushing since 1896.