Home › The Principles of Cookery › Liver Sausages, Mecklenburg, Smoked
Liver Sausages, Mecklenburg, Smoked
Take one pound of the cuttings of pork, and one pound of sward, or the skin of the pig cut from the loins. The tongue and kidneys, and a little fat may be added, if liked. Cut the meat into slices, and boil all gently in as little water as possible until quite tender. The sward should be put upon the fire before the rest of the meat, as it will require much longer boiling. Mince all very finely, and mix in the raw liver, which has been chopped and bruised and pressed through a coarse sieve. Season rather highly with salt, pepper, and half a dozen powdered cloves. Pour over the mince the fat which has risen to the top of the liquid in which the meat was boiled, and add, if approved, either a bruised shallot or a tea-spoonful of powdered or grated lemon-rind. When filling the skins, remember to leave room for swelling, and simmer the sausages gently in the same liquid in which the meat was boiled. The liver sausages may be used fresh or smoked as preferred. If smoked, two days will be long enough for them to hang. Time to boil large skins, one hour; small skins, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
This is a nineteenth-century German-style leberwurst, and the fault is not in the flavouring but in the curing and holding. The vocabulary is worth explaining even though the method cannot be followed.
- Why it fails: no curing saltThe seasoning is salt, pepper and cloves only. Stuffed casings are an anaerobic environment, which is exactly where Clostridium botulinum grows, and traditional smoked sausages relied on nitrate or nitrite to suppress it. Nothing here does that job.
- Why it fails: two days at an unstated temperature"Two days will be long enough for them to hang" gives no smokehouse temperature and no target internal temperature. A cooked, high-moisture liver sausage held for 48 hours anywhere in the 40-140F range is a growth medium, and this is smoke for flavour rather than any preservative process.
- Why it fails: raw liver stirred into cooked meatThe liver is sieved in raw and the sausage is then simmered in the cooking liquor, one hour for large skins and half an hour for small. That may or may not carry the core of a large casing to a safe temperature; no internal temperature is given and none can be assumed. Liver is a recognised carrier of enteric bacteria in fresh pork.
- Why it fails: no measured quantitiesWhy it fails: no measured cure -- The meat is weighed (a pound of cuttings, a pound of sward) but the salt is not: 'season rather highly.' Cure calculations depend on weight of meat to weight of salt and nitrite, and there is none of that arithmetic here. If you want smoked liver sausage, work from a current charcuterie recipe with weighed cure and stated temperatures.
- SwardPork rind or skin, from the archaic word for skin. Cassell's notes correctly that it needs a long head start in the pot; it is there for gelatine and body rather than flavour.
- Cuttings of porkTrim and offcuts from butchering the carcase. A modern equivalent would be shoulder trim.
- Probable cost, 2sTwo shillings for the eight to ten portions the recipe claims, in a book that routinely priced its dishes for households keeping a cook.
- Powdered lemon-rindDried zest ground to a powder, little seen now. Grated fresh rind, which the recipe also allows, is the surviving form.
Mecklenburg is on the Baltic coast of northern Germany; in the period of this book it was two grand duchies rather than a province. Leberwurst of this type -- boiled pork trim and rind, bound with raw sieved liver, seasoned with cloves and sometimes lemon peel -- belongs to the region's pig-killing traditions, when a household worked through a whole animal in a few days and used the skin, tongue and kidneys. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s from many hands, carried a long run of continental entries under national labels. The instruction to hang for smoke only two days marks this as a soft, fresh-eating sausage rather than a dry-cured keeping one, which is why it cannot be reproduced safely without a measured cure.