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Sausages, Bologna
These sausages are generally put into large skins and eaten uncooked. Ox-skins are the most suitable for the purpose. Real Bologna sausages can only be bought. To imitate them, take three pounds each of lean beef and lean pork; put the meat into hot water, and let it simmer gently for half an hour. Take it up, shred it finely, each kind separately, and mix with it a pound and a half of finely-shredded beef suet. Mix the meats thoroughly, season the mixture with fine pepper, thyme, and ground mace, and pound it to a smooth paste. Fill the prepared skins with it, and in filling them put long thin strips of fat bacon in among the meat. Tie the skins in eight-inch lengths; put the sausages in brine for ten days, then smoke them in the usual way. Rub pepper over the outside, and hang them in a cool, dry place till wanted. They will need only to be cut into slices and arranged neatly on a napkin before being sent to table. Time to smoke the sausages, three or four months. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. per pound.
This is a dry-cured, cold-smoked sausage meant to be sliced and eaten without further cooking, and the instructions leave out every variable that makes such a product safe. It cannot be reproduced from this text.
- No measured cureThe recipe calls for brine and smoke but gives no salt concentration, no nitrite or saltpetre quantity, and no target water activity. Stuffed casings are an anaerobic environment, which is exactly where Clostridium botulinum grows, and controlled nitrite levels are the barrier against it. "Put the sausages in brine for ten days" is not a specification.
- Smoked for months at an unstated temperature"Smoke them in the usual way" for "three or four months" implies a long, low smoking rather than a hot one, but the text gives no temperature at all. Nothing here indicates the meat reaches a pathogen-killing temperature, and without recorded chamber temperature and humidity there is no way to know whether it dries faster than it spoils.
- The half-hour simmer does nothing usefulThe half-hour simmer is not a control step -- Simmering the meat gently for thirty minutes and then shredding it gives no verified core temperature, and it leaves warm cooked meat handled at room temperature before stuffing. Modern fermented salami relies on an acidified, competitively-populated starter culture; a brief parboil is not a substitute.
- Eaten uncookedThe recipe itself says these sausages are "eaten uncooked," and the finished product is sliced and served cold. Any surviving Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli O157:H7 or Staphylococcus aureus toxin in the pork and beef goes straight to the table.
- Ox-skinsBeef middles and bungs, the large-diameter casings this refers to, are still sold by butchers' suppliers. Diameter matters enormously to drying rate in cured sausage, which is another reason the vague "large skins" here is not usable.
- If you want the dishBuy mortadella, or work from a current charcuterie text that specifies cure weights, pH targets, weight-loss percentages and chamber conditions.
- The costing"1s. 4d. per pound" is sixteen old pence; costings of this kind appear routinely through the book, aimed at a housekeeper working to a budget.
Bologna sausage takes its name from the city in Emilia, home of mortadella — a finely emulsified pork sausage studded with cubes of back fat, and the model for American "baloney." Cassell's is unusually candid about the limits of imitation: "Real Bologna sausages can only be bought," it says, before offering a beef-and-pork approximation with strips of bacon standing in for the characteristic fat inlays. That admission reflects the late-Victorian grocery trade, in which imported Continental charcuterie was a delicatessen luxury while the household cook was expected to attempt a version at home. It also shows how unmeasured domestic curing then was, well before nitrite levels, pH and drying loss were understood as the things that actually make a raw-eaten sausage safe.