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Russian Polony
Russian polony should be made of hard old Belfast hams, which are easily procured, and from beef, which is to be prepared in the following manner. Take a small round, or part of a large one, of ox beef, rub it all over with common salt, and scatter more under and over it; so let it lie four days. Then wipe it, and put it into the following pickle, in a deep pan:-- Water that has boiled..... 1 gallon Common salt..... 2 lbs.
Saltpetre..... 2 ounces Bay salt..... 2 lbs. Let it lie fourteen days more covered with pickle. Take it out and wipe it well; tie string round it, and hang it to smoke for twenty days in a powerful smoke, turning it often; and when taken from the chimney hang it in a warm dry room three weeks longer to harden. Take then an equal weight of ham and beef, and cut off all the hard fat, which put aside. Cut up the meat into small pieces, and leave no skinny or fibrous parts in it. Beat each separately in a mortar until very fine, and work it into a stiff paste, being completely mixed, add finely-ground black pepper, and then cut your hard fat up into small squares the size of a pea, and mix these generally and equally throughout the mass. Dissolve gum-dragon so that it is very thick, and work it amongst the meat until the paste has become just soft enough to stuff the skins, which must be the largest you can get, and taken from large oxen. Great care must be taken in filling them, so that the meat may soon be united into a solid mass, which can only be effected by force; the skins must then be well tied up, and hung to dry; they must be smoked for a fortnight, and kept three months in a dry closet.
This is a dry-cured, cold-smoked sausage meant to be kept for months and eaten without cooking, and it is one of the few things in Cassell's that genuinely cannot be reproduced at home today. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific reasons the method fails modern standards.
- Why it is unsafe: nothing is ever cookedThe beef is salted, pickled, smoked cold in a chimney, then minced raw and stuffed into skins that are smoked for a fortnight and stored three months. At no point does the meat reach a temperature that kills pathogens, so the entire safety of the product rests on salt concentration, water activity and pH — none of which the recipe measures or controls.
- Why it is unsafe: saltpetre by guessworkTwo ounces of saltpetre to a gallon of brine gives no usable indication of how much nitrate ends up in the finished sausage. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite or nitrate at fixed parts per million relative to meat weight, precisely because both under-curing and over-curing are dangerous.
- Why it is unsafe: botulism in a stuffed casingA large-diameter ox casing packed tight by force is exactly the low-oxygen environment in which Clostridium botulinum grows. Cold smoke at chimney temperatures warms the interior into the danger range without sterilising it, and the recipe specifies no drying temperature, no humidity, and no target weight loss.
- Why it is unsafe: unmeasured drying"Hang it in a warm dry room three weeks" and "kept three months in a dry closet" describe a drying process with no pH check and no ambient temperature or humidity given. A current, tested charcuterie recipe with weighed cure and monitored conditions should be used instead.
- PolonyAn English corruption of "Bologna," used through the nineteenth century for a large smooth-textured sausage of finely pounded meat. What "Russian" denotes here is not explained by the recipe.
- Belfast hamA dry-salted, hard-smoked Irish ham, valued in Victorian kitchens precisely because age had driven off moisture. Nothing on a modern counter matches it; supermarket ham is wet-cured and comparatively soft and mild.
- Bay saltCoarse sea salt, usually with more residual magnesium and calcium than refined salt; the name is generally traced to salt imported from the Bay of Biscay rather than to any local bay. "Common salt" is ordinary refined table or dairy salt.
- Gum-dragonGum tragacanth, the dried sap of Astragalus shrubs, sold by chemists as a thickener and binder. Here it is dissolved to a thick mucilage and worked into the paste to slacken it just enough for stuffing and to help it set solid.
- A round of ox beefThe hind leg, here either a small round or part of a large one, so a substantial joint in any case; it is tied with string before smoking.
Polony sausages take their name from Bologna, filtered through English pronunciation, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s the word covered a whole family of finely pounded, densely packed sausages sold by the slice. What sets this one apart is that it is not really a sausage recipe at all for most of its length: much of the instruction is given to manufacturing the raw material, a smoke-dried salt beef hard enough to be pounded in a mortar. The specification of "hard old Belfast hams, which are easily procured" suggests Irish dry-cured ham was readily available to British buyers, and the reliance on gum tragacanth — a druggist's item — shows how freely the Victorian kitchen borrowed from the chemist's shelf. The technique survives today as air-dried salami and its relations, but with weighed cures, starter cultures and measured humidity doing the work that this recipe leaves to the chimney and the season.