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BOLOGNA SAUSAGE
Take equal portions of fresh pork, veal, and ham or salt pork, chop them fine or grind, and mix together thoroughly; to nine pounds of the meat allow ten tea-spoons powdered sage, two each of cayenne and black pepper, one grated nutmeg, one teaspoon cloves, one minced onion, and sweet herbs to taste; mix well and stuff into beef intestines. (Wash the intestines thoroughly and cut them into lengths of two yards each; turn inside out, and again wash thoroughly in warm water, scraping with a scraper made for this purpose; throw into salt water to soak till used. Great care will be necessary in cleaning cases to avoid tearing them.) Tie up both ends of the bag tightly, prick in several places, and boil slowly for an hour; then dry them in the sun, and hang them in a cool dry cellar, after rubbing the outside of the skins with melted butter. These are eaten without further cooking, and are very nice.
This is a cured, ready-to-eat sausage made with no curing salt, no measured temperature and no controlled humidity, and the finished product is explicitly to be eaten without further cooking. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- No cure in the mixThe only preservatives here are salt carried in by the ham or salt pork and the spices. Genuine bologna and other cooked-then-kept sausages rely on nitrite (historically saltpetre) at a measured rate to suppress Clostridium botulinum in the anaerobic interior of a stuffed casing. A recipe that gives no cure and no weight of salt gives you no protection at all.
- An hour's slow boil is not a pasteurisation"Boil slowly" in a hearth kitchen could mean anything from 160F to a rolling simmer, and the centre of a two-yard sausage heats unevenly. Nothing in the method verifies that the core ever reached a temperature that would kill Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7 or Trichinella in the pork, yet the sausage is then eaten cold.
- Sun-drying then a cellarDrying in the sun puts a moist, cooked, nitrite-free meat product straight through the range where Staphylococcus aureus multiplies and produces a heat-stable toxin. The subsequent cellar has no specified temperature or humidity. Modern dry-cured sausage is fermented and dried to a target pH and a measured weight loss; none of that is present here.
- Pricking the casingPricking is meant to let steam escape so the skin does not burst, but it also opens the interior to surface bacteria and to whatever settles on it during the sun-drying. The butter rub that follows seals contamination in rather than out.
- Beef intestine cleaned at homeRaw beef casings are a recognised carrier of gut organisms, and the instruction to turn, scrape and hold them in salt water "till used" sets no time or temperature limit. Commercial natural casings today are cleaned, salted and held cold under inspection for exactly this reason.
- Nine pounds is a batch you cannot judgeThe seasoning is given in teaspoons against nine pounds of meat, but no salt weight at all, so there is no way to work backwards to a safe salt concentration for the mix. Any attempt to scale this recipe is guesswork on the one figure that matters most.
- If you want the dishUse a current sausage-making reference that specifies cure weight per kilogram of meat, an internal cooking temperature, and either refrigeration or a measured drying schedule. Do not treat this text as a working method.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, and much reprinted through the 1880s) grew out of recipes gathered from Ohio households that still killed their own hogs. Bologna takes its name from the Italian city, where mortadella — a finely ground, gently spiced pork sausage — is documented by the sixteenth or seventeenth century; the American version is usually credited to immigrant German and Italian butchers, and diverged into a coarser, sage-heavy farm product like this one. Sage, cayenne, nutmeg and cloves are all found in nineteenth-century American sausage recipes, and the mixing of fresh pork and veal with salt pork or ham is a practical way of borrowing salt and colour from meat already cured rather than curing fresh meat from scratch. Other contemporary recipes do call for saltpetre; its absence here suggests a sausage meant to be eaten within weeks by the family that made it, in a cold cellar, in winter, under conditions no modern kitchen reproduces.