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Spanish Sausages, or Chorissas
Take equal weights of fat and lean pork cut from the prime parts of the animal; mince this finely, and season strongly with garlic and cayenne. Pour over it as much dry sherry as will cover it, and let it stand in a cool place for three or four days till it has absorbed the liquor. Put the meat into large skins, and moisten with the liquor that remains. Tie the sausages in links, and hang them in a cool, dry place. They will keep for six or eight months. When wanted drop the sausages into hot water, and let them simmer gently until done enough. Serve them with rice boiled as for curry. Time to boil the sausages, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, about 1s. per pound.
This is a dry-cured, uncooked, fermented-style sausage, and the instructions leave out every number that makes such a thing safe. It is worth reading as a document of Victorian charcuterie, but it should not be attempted from this text.
- No salt weight at allThe recipe seasons "strongly with garlic and cayenne" and never specifies salt. Salt at a measured percentage of the meat weight — not seasoning to taste — is what draws water out and suppresses spoilage organisms in a hung sausage. Without it there is nothing controlling the interior of the casing.
- No curing saltDry-cured sausages hung for months rely on nitrite or nitrate (modern Cure #2, historically saltpetre) to inhibit Clostridium botulinum. A stuffed casing is a low-oxygen environment held for weeks at ambient temperature, which is precisely the condition that organism requires. Nothing in this formula provides that inhibition.
- The sherry does not preserveDry sherry is roughly 15 percent alcohol, and once it is absorbed into a large mass of pork it is diluted far below any antimicrobial level. Three or four days of soaking flavours the meat; it does not cure it.
- No temperature or humidity given"A cool, dry place" covered a Victorian larder that might sit at 8-12C in winter and much warmer in summer. Modern curing chambers are held to narrow ranges of temperature and relative humidity because too warm invites pathogens and too dry case-hardens the outside while the centre stays wet.
- No acidification or weight loss targetContemporary practice ferments the mince with a measured starter culture to drop the pH, then dries to a specified loss of green weight before the sausage is considered stable. This recipe measures nothing and simply asserts the sausages "will keep for six or eight months."
- The final simmer does not fix itTwenty minutes in gently simmering water will heat the sausages through, and botulinum toxin itself is heat-labile, so thorough cooking can inactivate it. But "simmer gently until done enough" is not a measured control, and cooking at the end cannot be relied on as a remedy for an unsafe cure.
- If you want chorizoUse a current recipe from a source that gives salt and cure percentages by weight, a starter culture, and chamber conditions — or buy it. Fresh Spanish-style sausage cooked immediately is a different and unproblematic proposition, but it is not what this page describes.
Chorizo — "chorissas" here looks like an anglicised rendering of the Spanish chorizos — is the great cured pork sausage of the Iberian peninsula, and its defining modern flavour is pimentón, the smoked or sweet dried paprika made from capsicums that reached Spain from the Americas in the sixteenth century. Cassell's substitutes cayenne, which may suggest the compiler was working from a description of the sausage's heat and red colour rather than from a Spanish kitchen; the garlic and the dry sherry, at least, point in the right direction, sherry being the wine of Andalusia and long a British import. The recipe sits in a late-Victorian dictionary aimed at English households who were meeting foreign charcuterie mostly as an imported delicacy, and its blithe confidence that a home-hung sausage "will keep for six or eight months" comes before the chemistry of nitrate curing had been worked out. The instruction to serve them with rice "boiled as for curry" suggests how the book's readers filed unfamiliar spiced food.