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Pork and Potato Sausages
Take a pound of pork, cook it until two-thirds done, then pass it through the mincer. Take three pounds of potatoes that have been cooked in their skins, peel them, and beat them to a paste; add plenty of salt and pepper, and a little nutmeg and mace. Mix the pork and potatoes well together, and fill sausage-skins with the mixture. Leave them in a cloth for a day, then hang in a current of air for a few hours previous to frying. Probable cost, 1s. For richer sausages increase the proportion of pork.
This is an economy sausage — three parts potato to one part pork — and the method depends on a cold larder and a tolerance for risk that no modern kitchen shares. The problem is not the frying at the end but the day that comes before it.
- Partially cooked pork, then held warmPartially cooked pork, then left at ambient temperature -- The pork is cooked only "two-thirds done" and then minced, which distributes any surviving bacteria through the whole mass; the mixture then sits for a day and hangs for several hours more with no cooling specified. Nothing brings it back to a safe temperature before that rest, though the frying at the end would.
- Cooked potato is the real hazardCooked potato is a hazard in its own right -- Boiled potato held at room temperature is a documented vehicle for Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling and whose emetic toxin is heat-stable. Frying the sausage the next day would kill the bacteria but not destroy toxin already formed.
- Stuffed casings are an anaerobic environmentStuffed casings are oxygen-poor -- A filled skin restricts air, though it does not seal the mixture. A low-acid, low-salt mixture of meat and potato sitting for a day in a casing at ambient temperature is the sort of condition that curing salts and refrigeration exist to guard against.
- No cure, no measured salt"Plenty of salt" is not a preservation instruction. Traditional keeping sausages rely on a weighed percentage of salt and, usually, nitrite; this recipe has neither, and the potato dilutes what salt there is.
- "A current of air" assumed a cold larderThe drying stage presumes an unheated pantry well below modern room temperature. The recipe gives no temperature and no season at all, so any figures are inference.
- What to do insteadIf you want a potato-and-pork sausage, use a current recipe with weighed salt, a stated fat ratio, refrigerated resting and a target internal temperature. The historical text is worth reading; it is not worth eating.
- On the costing"Probable cost, 1s." is one shilling for the batch — the whole point of the entry. Three pounds of potato to one of pork is a stretching ratio, and the closing line about increasing the pork tells you which direction was considered an improvement.
Potato appears here as an extender in place of the rusk and breadcrumb more usual in British sausage-making. The ratio — three to one in favour of potato — marks it as an economical recipe, the kind of thing costed to the shilling for a household budget rather than a butcher's counter; the closing note that richer sausages simply mean more pork makes the hierarchy explicit. The seasoning of nutmeg and mace alongside pepper is thoroughly conventional for nineteenth-century British sausage, a survival of the older English habit of treating pork with sweet spice. The hanging stage, which reads alarmingly now, reflects a period when a day's rest in a cloth in a cold larder was understood as the way a sausage firmed up and lost surface moisture before frying.