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Pork Sausages, for Eating Cold
Put two pounds of pork, fat and lean together, and two pounds of lean beef into a pickle for ten days (see PORK, PICKLED). Take the meat out, wash, drain, and dry it, mince it finely, season with a little black pepper, salt, and allspice, mix thoroughly, and put it into skins. Tie the ends securely, wrap the sausages in one fold of muslin, and hang them in smoke, as hams are hung, until they turn red. When wanted, throw them into boiling water, let them simmer gently until done enough, let them get cold, and serve cut into thin slices. Time to boil, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. per pound.
This is a cured, cold-smoked sausage of the cervelat type, and it belongs to a period before anyone measured curing salts or smokehouse temperatures. The instructions below explain what the original assumes and where it fails by current standards.
- The pickle is undefinedEverything depends on the cross-reference to PORK, PICKLED, and the recipe as printed gives no weights, no salt percentage and no saltpetre figure. A cure for a smoked, hung sausage has to be weighed against the meat to a fixed percentage; "a pickle for ten days" is not a measurement.
- Cold smoke is not cookingHanging sausages in smoke "as hams are hung" means smoke below about 85F for days. The meat sits for that whole period in the temperature range where Clostridium botulinum and staphylococci grow, and only correctly dosed nitrite plus controlled water activity holds them back. Neither is specified here.
- "Until they turn red"If the pickle contained saltpetre, the colour is nitrite reacting with myoglobin; smoke and surface drying also darken a hung casing. Either way the colour suggests the cure has acted, not that enough was used or that it reached the centre of a stuffed casing. Colour is not a safety test.
- Botulism is the specific riskBotulism is a specific risk -- stuffed, tied, muslin-wrapped casings hung in cool smoke create the low-oxygen, low-acid, ambient-temperature conditions in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. Boiling inactivates preformed toxin but not the spores, so the hazard is established during the days of hanging, not fixed at the end.
- The final boil is not a rescueHalf an hour of gentle simmering brings the sausage up to temperature, but it is then cooled and sliced to be eaten cold. Contamination or growth established during the smoking phase is not reliably undone by that half hour.
- Natural casings todaySalted hog casings still exist and are sold by butchers and online, but modern practice pairs them with weighed cure #1 or #2, a target internal temperature and a measured drying loss. If you want a sliceable cold sausage, work from a current charcuterie text with those numbers in it.
- Reading the cost line1s. 2d. per pound is fourteen pence in pre-decimal money, quoted for a domestic British market. It is a period price index, not a modern guide.
Cassell's puts this among the sausages meant to be kept and sliced rather than fried fresh — a cured, smoked, half-beef mixture that could hang in a chimney corner and be cut cold for supper or a travelling luncheon. The instruction to hang it "in smoke, as hams are hung" places it alongside the household's bacon and hams, and the sausage is wrapped in muslin before it goes up. Recipes like this one survived in print well into the era of commercial curing; the science of nitrite dosage and smokehouse temperature control that makes such sausages safe is generally reckoned a twentieth-century development, arriving after books of this kind were written.