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Mecklenburg Liver Sausages
Take the liver from a pig while it is quite fresh; mince it, and then pass it through a coarse sieve, but first ascertain its weight. To a pound of the liver, mix half a pound of pork (boiled tender), that has been cut from any part of the pig, although slices from the breast are usually taken. Take the tongue, kidneys, and some of the inside fat; chop this meat, but do not mince it, and mix all with the raw liver. Season with salt, pepper, powdered cloves or allspice, and a few sage-leaves reduced to powder. The top-fat, from the boiling of the meat, and the liquor should both be used. When filling, put the fat, with the meat, into the skins, and boil the sausages in the liquor (saltea), which must be made quite hot before they are put in. Plunge them, when cooked, into cold water; then hang them to dry. To be smoked, or not. The skins must be only three-parts filled. Time to boil, half an hour. MECKLENBURG LIVER SAUSAGES (another way). (See LIVER SAUSAGES, MECKLENBURG, SMOKED.)
This is a nineteenth-century farmhouse charcuterie procedure rather than a kitchen recipe, and the gaps in it are the whole problem: no cure is specified, no salt weight, no temperature at any stage. The notes below explain what is missing and why the omissions matter.
- No measured cureKeeping sausages of this kind were often made with saltpetre or, later, curing salt, though this text gives no proportion at all. The only guidance is "season with salt" and a boiling liquor described as saltea (an obscure or corrupted term, possibly meaning simply the salted cooking broth). Without a weighed nitrite or nitrate proportion, and given that the sausages are then hung and possibly smoked, the method cannot be reproduced safely as written.
- Raw liver in a sealed casingThe raw minced liver is combined with pork boiled tender, together with tongue, kidney and inside fat, packed into a casing and given half an hour in hot liquor. Nothing in the method establishes that the centre of the sausage reaches a safe temperature, and the original gives no thermometer reading.
- Hanging to dryAfter the cold-water plunge, the sausages are hung to dry; the recipe specifies no place, temperature or duration. A moist, low-acid, anaerobic meat interior held at room temperature is the classic condition for Clostridium botulinum, which is precisely what a measured cure is there to prevent.
- Optional smoking"To be smoked, or not" leaves the most safety-critical variable to the cook's discretion. Traditional cold-smoking runs well below any pasteurising temperature; it flavours and dries the surface and does nothing dependable to the interior.
- Offal handlingPig liver and kidney are generally reckoned to carry a higher bacterial load than muscle meat. The instruction "quite fresh" is doing work that a modern supply chain cannot be assumed to replicate.
- If you want liver sausageUse a current recipe from a charcuterie source that gives cure percentages by weight of meat and internal cooking temperatures. Do not attempt to fill in the missing numbers from this text.
- The one detail worth keeping"The skins must be only three-parts filled" is sound and still taught: the forcemeat swells as the fat renders, and an overfilled casing bursts in the poaching liquor.
Mecklenburg, on the Baltic coast of northern Germany, is Leberwurst country, and this entry is one of several German regional sausages gathered up in the New Dictionary of Cookery. The method is pig-killing-day cookery: the liver, tongue, kidneys and inside fat all had to be used at once, before they spoiled, and the broth from boiling the pork does double duty as the poaching liquor so that nothing is thrown away. The cross-reference at the end, to a smoked version under a separate heading, is characteristic of the book's alphabetical sprawl, and the word saltea remains puzzling.