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Sausage, Italian
Mince two pounds of lean pork with one pound of fat pork. Season the mixture with salt, mixed spice, coriander-seed, and bruised aniseed. When the ingredients are thoroughly blended, moisten the mixture with pig's blood and white wine sufficiently to bind it together, but be careful not to render it too moist. Cut some narrow strips from the best part of a calf's head, mix these with the mince, and put the preparation into sausage-skins. Tie the ends securely, plunge the sausages into boiling water, and boil them gently until done enough. Afterwards dry them in a smoke-house, or in a chimney over a wood fire, till they become hard. Time to boil, half an hour.
This is a blood-bound, boiled-then-dried salame of the biroldo family, and it is one of the entries in Cassell's that has not survived contact with modern food safety. The notes below explain what the ingredients are and why the method cannot be followed.
- The hinge, and the problemThe sausages are boiled briefly and then dried to hardness in a smoke-house or chimney. There is no measured salt, no nitrite or nitrate, no stated drying temperature and no humidity control — the exact combination in which Clostridium botulinum thrives in an anaerobic casing. Dried, fermented and cold-smoked sausages are made safely today only to a tested formula with weighed cure and monitored temperature, pH and water activity.
- Pig's bloodFresh blood is highly perishable and a ready medium for Salmonella and other pathogens; it also clots within minutes of collection unless stirred with salt or citrate. The recipe assumes a household killing its own pig. Blood sold for food today is a controlled product and is not the same thing as what this instruction imagines.
- Calf's headThe "best part" probably refers to the fleshy cheek and the gelatinous meat about the jaw, which sets firm on cooling and gives the sliced sausage its mosaic. Whole calf's head is now a special order from a butcher, and specified-risk material rules govern what parts of a bovine head may be sold at all in the UK and EU.
- "Boil them gently until done enough"No internal temperature is given, and half an hour is a guess that depends entirely on casing diameter. A large sausage cooked by this instruction may be well short of pasteurised at the centre — and it then goes into a warm chimney to dry.
- Mixed spiceThe Victorian pudding-spice blend: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, sometimes ginger and mace. With coriander and bruised aniseed it gives the sweet-warm profile still found in central Italian blood sausages.
- Sausage-skinsNatural hog casings, sold salted and needing a long soak and flushing. The narrow strips of head meat mean this wants a wide casing rather than a breakfast-sausage one.
- If you want to make itUse a current recipe from a source that gives weighed cure salt, a fermentation schedule and target water activity. Do not adapt the text above.
Blood sausages bound with wine and spiced with anise and coriander are a real and long-lived Italian type — the Tuscan biroldo and mallegato and their Emilian and Ligurian cousins all belong to the same family, built from the parts of the pig that had to be used the day it was killed, extended with meat from the head. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, assembled in the 1870s, was frankly encyclopaedic: it swept up continental charcuterie alongside English puddings and presented each in a few lines, on the assumption that a reader had either a kitchen with a wood chimney or a cook who knew what "done enough" meant. The entry is a good illustration of how much such books left to the operator. Nothing here tells you how much salt to use, though salt was only one part of the preservation, which also relied on boiling, smoking and drying to hardness — a silence that was workable in a household that made the same sausage every winter and fatal to anyone trying to reconstruct it cold.