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Pork Saveloys
Take three pounds of tender pork free from skin and sinew; rub it well with half an ounce of saltpetre and eight ounces of common salt. Leave it for three or four days, and turn and rub it every day. Mince finely, and mix with it a heaped tea-spoonful of white pepper, half a dozen young sage-leaves chopped small, and half a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Mix these ingredients thoroughly. Fill the skins which have been prepared according to the directions given in the recipe for making pork sausages, tie them securely at both ends, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve either hot or cold. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
This is a cured sausage, and the curing is the problem: the salt-and-saltpetre stage is far outside modern limits, and the recipe gives no temperature for the days the meat sits. Read it as a document rather than a working method, and use a current charcuterie recipe if you want saveloys.
- The saltpetre doseHalf an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, about 14 g) to three pounds of pork is roughly 1 per cent of the meat weight, many times the nitrate level permitted in cured meat today. Because the saltpetre is rubbed on the surface and some of it goes off with the brine the salt draws out, the amount actually eaten cannot be known, but it is potentially large enough to be a real concern.
- An uncontrolled cureThe pork is salted and left three or four days, turned daily, with no refrigeration and no stated room temperature. Victorian larders were cold; a modern kitchen is not, and dry-cured pork held at ambient temperature is the classic setting for spoilage, while the anaerobic interior of a stuffed casing is the sort of environment in which Clostridium botulinum can become a concern.
- No measured salt ratio for the minceEight ounces of salt is applied to the outside of the whole piece, then the meat is minced; how much salt actually stays in the sausage is unknowable. Safe curing depends on a known percentage of salt and cure by weight of meat, which this recipe cannot give.
- Skins and a cross-referenceThe natural casings are prepared under the book's pork sausage entry, so this page is not self-contained. Casings are also the point at which a cured, stuffed, gently baked product needs a verified internal temperature, which the original never mentions.
- Half an hour is not a doneness test"Bake in a moderate oven" -- usually rendered as somewhere around 350F -- for thirty minutes tells you nothing about the centre of a thick stuffed casing. The recipe's offer to serve the sausages cold compounds the risk if they were underdone.
Saveloy comes into English from the French cervelas, itself generally traced to Italian cervellata, a sausage that originally contained pig's brains — the name shares a root with cerebellum. By the nineteenth century the brains had gone and the English saveloy was a highly seasoned, lightly cured pork sausage, sold ready-cooked from cook-shops and street stalls and eaten hot with pease pudding or cold with bread; Dickens's London is full of them. The distinguishing features were the cure, which gave the pink interior, the sage and pepper, and the bread-crumb filler that stretched the meat, all of which this recipe keeps. Saltpetre was the standard curing agent in domestic kitchens for centuries and was sold freely by grocers and chemists, which is why a book like Cassell's could specify it by the half-ounce without comment; the understanding that nitrate needs tight limits belongs to the twentieth century.