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Sausages, to Prepare the Skins For
A hog's or an ox's intestines are used to put sausages into. They are thus prepared. Empty them, cut them into lengths, and lay them for three or four days in salt and water, or weak lime-water. Turn them inside out two or three times, and scrape them well. Rinse them well, dry them with a soft cloth, and they will be ready for use.
This is the abattoir end of sausage-making, written for a household that killed its own pig and had the guts in hand within the hour. The method cannot be followed as printed, and the reasons are worth setting out.
- Days at room temperatureDays in an unspecified soak -- Raw intestine is among the most heavily contaminated tissue in the carcass, and the instruction to lay it in salt and water for three or four days assumes a cold larder, a fresh kill and a brine strong enough to matter. No salt concentration, no temperature and no holding conditions are given, so there is nothing here to control spoilage organisms or enteric pathogens during the soak.
- Weak lime-water is not specifiedLime-water is a solution of calcium hydroxide, strongly alkaline. "Weak" covers everything from a harmless rinse to a caustic one, and the recipe gives no strength, no soak limit and no neutralising step beyond rinsing. Without a measured concentration this is not a food process.
- Cleaning is not disinfectionTurning, scraping and rinsing removes the mucosa and the contents, and reduces the surface load, but it cannot be relied on to make the submucosa that becomes the casing safe. Commercial natural casings are cleaned and held in salt or brine under regulated conditions.
- Buy the casings insteadNatural hog and beef casings are sold packed in dry salt or brine, already stripped, calibrated and food-safe. They need only a soak in cool water and a rinse before use, and any current sausage recipe will give the details.
- What the two intestines were forHog casings, commonly sold around 32-35 mm though the range is wider, took pork and breakfast-type sausage; ox (beef) rounds and middles are wider and tougher and went into large boiling sausages, black pudding and salami-type work. The recipe itself offers no reason for the choice.
- "Turn them inside out"The point of the repeated turning and scraping was to strip away the inner mucous membrane and the outer fat and muscle, leaving only the thin translucent submucosa. That is the same layer you get in a modern packet of casings, arrived at by machine rather than by thumbnail and the back of a knife.
Casing preparation was likely assumed knowledge for a cook working from a whole carcass: pig-killing was, by most accounts, a late-autumn household event across much of rural Britain, and the intestines were dealt with the same day along with the caul, the blood and the chitterlings. The lime-water alternative reflects a period when slaked lime was an ordinary household commodity, kept for whitewash and for preserving eggs, and used freely as a cleaning alkali. Instructions like these survived in print for readers who prepared their own.