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Mecklenburg Sausages
Prepare the following ingredients, with which fill the sausage-skins, and boil half an hour:--Chop finely equal proportions of fat and lean pork, and to every pound add a small tea-spoonful of salt, pepper, grated lemon-peel, and half that quantity of ground allspice. If these ingredients appear too dry, they may be moistened with a little wine or brandy. When made with equal weight of lean beef and fat pork, then pressed one whole day and smoked, these sausages will keep, without being cooked, for many weeks; they are usually sliced, and eaten raw. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
The page contains two recipes in one: a fresh pork sausage that is boiled, and a beef-and-pork version that is pressed, smoked and then eaten raw in slices. The second is the reason this page carries a warning.
- The raw-eaten version has no cureNothing here provides curing salt, and there is no nitrite or nitrate to inhibit Clostridium botulinum during a slow smoke at low temperature. Salt at "a small tea-spoonful per pound" is roughly 1 per cent, well under the level that would preserve meat on its own, and the recipe treats it as seasoning rather than as a cure.
- No temperature, humidity or weight loss is specifiedA fermented or dried sausage safe to eat uncooked depends on measured pH drop, a controlled drying environment and a target weight loss, usually around 30-40 per cent. "Pressed one whole day and smoked" specifies none of these, so there is no way to know whether the interior ever became inhospitable to pathogens.
- Raw pork specificallyEaten raw — The beef-and-pork mixture is eaten without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella, pathogenic E. coli, Listeria or Trichinella. The recipe gives no smoking temperature, and smoking of this kind dries meat rather than pasteurising it.
- Casing and stuffingCasing and stuffing — "Sausage-skins" means natural casings, which are generally sold salt-packed and need soaking and flushing before use. Modern collagen casings are not interchangeable for a product intended to dry.
- Cost note"Probable cost, 10d. per pound" is a Victorian market price in pre-decimal pence and has no bearing on anything you would pay now. Cassell's gave these figures throughout so a housekeeper could budget a meal.
- If you want dry sausageUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure weights by percentage of meat, fermentation temperature and a drying target. This one cannot be adjusted into that by guesswork.
Mecklenburg lies on the Baltic coast of what is now northern Germany, and the raw-sliced smoked type belongs to the same north German tradition that produced Mettwurst and the spreadable raw sausages still sold there. The seasoning here — allspice and lemon peel — differs from the sage and mace common in English sausage recipes. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in Victorian London, ranged widely for its entries and printed continental formulas alongside British ones, with a cost per pound attached so that a household could compare them against the butcher's price. What the entry does not carry is any sense that eating an uncooked smoked sausage requires controlled conditions: the safety of such sausages rested on the practical knowledge of the smokehouse, a cold northern climate and the maker's experience, none of which travels in a paragraph.