Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sausages, Savoury
Sausages, Savoury
Take equal quantities of fat and lean pork-Rub the meat well with salt, and a little saltpetre, and pepper, or lay it in brine, and leave it for six days. Take it up, mince it finely, and with it a couple of shallots or a little onion, and add pepper and allspice to taste. Put it into large skins, tie both ends, cover with muslin, and hang the sausages up in a smoke-house for ten days or a fortnight. Rub ground ginger over the outside, and leave the sausages in a cool place till wanted. Boil the sausages or not, according to taste, cut them into thin slices, and serve them cold. Time to boil, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 1d. per pound.
This is a dry-cured, cold-smoked pork sausage of the kind a Victorian household with its own smoke-house could make. Every control that makes such a product safe — curing-salt weight, brine strength, temperature, humidity, time at temperature — is either absent or left to judgement, and the finished sausage is explicitly offered uncooked. It is worth reading as a record of how the work was done, not as a set of instructions to follow.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured"A little saltpetre" is potassium nitrate, the nitrate cure that inhibits Clostridium botulinum. Its effective range is narrow: too little and the cure fails, too much and the meat is genuinely toxic. Modern curing works to a measured percentage of nitrite or nitrate against the exact weight of meat, and no phrase in this recipe supplies that.
- Stuffed casings are an anaerobic environmentGround meat packed into a tied skin and held for weeks at ambient temperature is the textbook condition for botulinum growth. Cold smoke does not sterilise; it dries the surface and deposits phenols, and the interior of a large-diameter sausage stays well within the danger zone throughout.
- The brine has no strength given"Lay it in brine" for six days tells you nothing about salt concentration or the temperature of the room. A weak brine at Victorian larder temperatures cures the outside and spoils the middle.
- The smoke-house temperature is unstatedTen days to a fortnight of smoking could mean anything from a genuinely cold smoke in a cool month to a warm smoke that holds pork at incubation temperature for a fortnight. The recipe gives no guidance either way, and a modern reader has no default to fall back on.
- It is meant to be eaten uncooked"Boil the sausages or not, according to taste" makes the cure the only safety step. Historically this carried a real risk of Trichinella from pork; curing with long drying, or thorough cooking, were the recognised safeguards.
- Ground ginger is not a preservativeThe ginger rubbed over the outside is generally explained as a deterrent against flies and mites on hanging meat, and it perfumes the casing. It does nothing for what is happening inside the sausage.
- If you want to make cured sausageUse a current tested recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated pH or water-activity target, and a monitored fermentation and drying schedule.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households that still, in the country at least, expected to handle a pig from carcass to larder. Autumn pig-killing produced meat that had to last until spring. Saltpetre had been the standard meat cure in English kitchens for centuries before its chemistry was understood; it was sold by grocers and druggists alike, and recipe books of this period often specified it by the handful or the pinch. Ginger rubbed on hanging bacon and sausages is an old English larder habit, generally explained as a deterrent to flies and mites rather than a flavouring.