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WESTPHALIAN SAUSAGES (a German recipe)
Take twelve pounds of any parts of pork, fat and lean together, and cut it up. It should not be minced so fine as for other sausages, in fact, the pieces should not be smaller than peas. Season with half an ounce of black pepper freshly ground, and a quarter of a pound of salt, sprinkling the seasoning among the meat before mincing. After filling in the pig-skins, hang the sausages to smoke for a week. If to be eaten fresh, the sausages will be improved by hanging for a few days in a cool dry place.
This is a genuine coarse-cut smoked sausage of the German butcher's tradition, but the method as printed omits every control that makes such a product safe. The notes below explain the gaps rather than close them.
- No curing salt at allTwelve pounds of raw pork is seasoned with plain salt and pepper only, then hung for a week in smoke. Traditional smoked and air-dried sausages rely on nitrite or nitrate (saltpetre) to suppress Clostridium botulinum, which thrives in the oxygen-free interior of a stuffed casing. Nothing here does that job.
- The smoke is almost certainly cold smokeA week of hanging means smoke well below cooking temperature. The meat is never brought anywhere near a safe internal temperature, and it sits for days in the range where bacteria multiply. Modern cold-smoked raw sausage is made under measured temperature, humidity and pH control, with a starter culture, none of which appears here.
- Salt level is low for a keeping sausageA quarter pound of salt in twelve pounds of meat is roughly two per cent by weight. That is a seasoning level, appropriate for a fresh sausage cooked promptly, not a preserving level for something intended to hang.
- "If to be eaten fresh, hang a few days"The alternative given is raw pork in casings held for several days in what the recipe calls "a cool dry place". Nineteenth-century larders were cold; a modern kitchen is not, and this instruction should not be followed even in the mild version.
- What the old terms mean"Pig-skins" are natural hog casings, still sold salted by butchers and online suppliers. "Not smaller than peas" describes a coarse hand-chop or the widest plate of a grinder, which is what gives Westphalian-style sausage its open, mosaic cut surface.
- If you want to make thisUse a current recipe from a source that specifies cure quantities in parts per million, smoking temperatures, target water activity and a finished pH. Coarse smoked pork sausage is entirely achievable at home; it simply cannot be done from these directions.
Westphalia, in north-western Germany, built its reputation on pork: the region's oak and beech mast fattened the pigs, and beechwood and juniper smoke cured the hams that carried its name across Europe from at least the seventeenth century. Sausages made from the trimmings followed the same route through the smokehouse, and the coarse pea-sized cut called for here is characteristic of German butchery, where the grain of the meat is meant to be visible on the cut face rather than emulsified away. Cassell's marks the entry simply as a German recipe, and it reads as one written for a household that could assume a cold cellar, a working smokehouse and a great deal of knowledge left unwritten.