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Bologna Sausage
Take equal quantities of beef and pork, pound it to a paste, and season it very highly with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, and a little garlic. When this mixture is put into the skins, add a strip or two of fat bacon; it may then be boiled for one hour, or smoked for two or three months, when it will be fit for use. The Italians eat it in its uncooked state. Probable cost of meat, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
This entry compresses two entirely different products into one paragraph: a fresh boiled sausage and a months-long cured, smoked one meant to be eaten raw. The second cannot be reproduced safely from these directions, and the first is written too loosely to follow as given.
- No curing salt, no measurementsA sausage held at ambient temperature for two or three months and then eaten uncooked depends entirely on nitrite or nitrate, a measured salt concentration, and controlled humidity to suppress Clostridium botulinum. This recipe specifies none of them — "season it very highly with pepper, salt" is not a cure. Botulinum toxin is not destroyed by tasting, smelling or slicing, and the sausage gives no warning.
- Cold smoke is not cookingNineteenth-century smoking of this kind was generally done well below any temperature that kills pathogens; the smoke contributes surface antimicrobials and drying, not safety. Two or three months of smoke on an uncured raw forcemeat is not a reliable preservation method.
- Raw pork forcemeat"The Italians eat it in its uncooked state" describes a properly fermented and cured salume, not this mixture. Raw ground pork also carries the classic historical risk of Trichinella.
- The boiled version is underspecifiedEven the one-hour boiled sausage gives no diameter for the casing and no finished temperature, so there is no way to know when the interior of a densely packed pounded paste is actually cooked through. If you want boiled or smoked sausage, work from a current recipe with weighed cure and a stated internal temperature.
- Reading the old terms"Skins" are natural casings, hog or beef depending on the calibre wanted. "Pound it to a paste" means a mortar — the fine, bound texture is what distinguishes bologna from a coarse country sausage.
- The cost line10d. to 1s. per pound is ten pence to one shilling in pre-decimal money, twelve pence to the shilling.
Bologna sausage takes its name from the city of Bologna, home of mortadella, the finely pounded, fat-studded pork sausage that English cooks were imitating and importing by the seventeenth century. By the time this dictionary was compiled the word in English had drifted to mean almost any large, smooth-textured, highly spiced sausage of mixed beef and pork, which is how it reached the United States and eventually became supermarket "baloney." The strip of fat bacon laid into the casing here is a rough approximation of the cubes of fat that give real mortadella its mosaic cross-section. The closing note that "the Italians eat it in its uncooked state" is characteristic of the period: British writers recorded continental practice with interest and some suspicion, and here hedge by offering a boiling time as well.