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VIRGINIA SAUSAGE MEAT
Pick the sausage meat to get out all the pieces of bones and strings; wash it in lukewarm water, and lay on a table to drain; let it stand all night. Take off some of the fat from the backbone to mix with the lean. If you use "leaf fat" when you fry the sausage, it will melt away to gravy and leave a little knot of lean, hard and dry, floating in a sea of melted grease. The fat must be taken off before the chines are salted, and washed, skinned and put to drain with the lean. Next day, chop it fine, picking out all the strings. When fine enough, season it with salt, sage, black and red pepper, to taste. Pack it in a close vessel. If you wish to stuff them, have some nicely-cleaned chitterlings kept in salt and water ten days or a fortnight. Stuff, hang on sticks and dry. A little smoke improves them; too much makes them bitter.
This is hog-killing-day work from the era when a household butchered its own pig in cold weather and preserved everything the same week. The seasoning notes are still sound; the hanging, drying and smoking instructions are not safe to follow.
- Why the cured version failsThe salt is added "to taste" with no weight given, no curing salt or saltpetre is used, and the stuffed sausages are hung to dry at whatever the ambient temperature happened to be. Stuffed casings are an anaerobic environment, which is precisely where Clostridium botulinum can grow; without a measured nitrite cure and a controlled temperature there is nothing in this method that reliably prevents it.
- Smoke is not a cook"A little smoke improves them" describes cold smoking, which flavours the meat but never brings it near a temperature that kills pathogens. Pork also carries a historic risk of Trichinella, addressed today by cooking through -- ground pork and sausage to 160F -- or by a validated freezing schedule, neither of which appears here. If you want dried or smoked sausage, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated temperatures.
- ChinesThe chine is the backbone section with the meat along it, salted down as a separate cut. The instruction is simply to strip its fat before the bones go into the salt barrel, since fat left on salted bone was wasted.
- Leaf fatThe hard fat sheet around the kidneys, prized for lard because it renders clean and pale. The warning is accurate: leaf fat renders almost entirely to liquid in the pan, so sausage made with it fries down to dry lean crumbs swimming in grease. Back fat holds its structure and is what the recipe wants.
- ChitterlingsHere it means the cleaned intestines used as casings, not the cooked dish of the same name. Modern equivalents are hog casings bought packed in salt, which are rinsed and soaked rather than held in brine for a fortnight.
- The overnight drainWashing the trimmings in lukewarm water and letting them drain overnight belongs to an unheated winter meat house. In a modern kitchen this is a long period at unsafe temperature, and it is the point where the whole procedure diverges from current practice.
- Chopping"Chop it fine" means hand-chopping with a knife or a hand-cranked mincer. A meat grinder with a coarse plate gives the same texture; keep meat and fat very cold so the fat cuts rather than smears.
- The seasoning is the part worth keepingSalt, sage, black pepper and cayenne is the classic Southern fresh-sausage line, and it transfers directly to a modern fresh bulk sausage made and cooked the same day. Roughly 1.5 to 2 percent salt by weight of meat is the usual modern figure.
This one carries its origin in the title: sage-forward, cayenne-spiked pork sausage is associated with the Virginia and wider Upland South hog-killing tradition, as distinct from sweeter or fennel-scented sausages elsewhere. The text assumes the annual ritual of slaughtering in the first hard cold of late autumn, when the carcass could be broken down over several unheated days and every part had a destination: hams and chines to the salt, leaf fat to the lard kettle, trimmings to sausage, intestines to casings. Cold-weather butchering was itself the safety measure, and the practice receded from home kitchens as household refrigeration and commercially cured and manufactured sausage spread.