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Westphalian Sausages
Take six pounds of lean beef and two pounds of cow's udder fat; boil the meat, but let the fat parboil only; then mince them up as fine as possible; take about a third of the quantity in bread-crumbs, which have been soaked in the soup, the liquor being well pressed from them; add salt, pounded pepper, cloves, and suitable herbs; mix the whole well together, and fill fat ox-entrails which have been thoroughly cleaned. Parboil them; then smoke them of a yellowish colour. They may be eaten with other things, or warmed with cabbage, or fried in butter. These sausages will not keep very long.
This is a nineteenth-century smokehouse sausage, and the reasons it cannot be reproduced today are structural rather than a matter of adjusting quantities.
- No cure, no measurements, no temperaturesThe meat is boiled, minced, mixed with wet bread, stuffed into casings, parboiled a second time and then held in a smoke chamber at an unstated temperature for an unstated time, judged only by colour. A dense, moist, low-acid sausage held at smoking warmth after so brief a parboil can sit in the range in which Clostridium botulinum and staphylococci multiply, and no nitrite is present to suppress them. Curing and smoking are safe only with weighed cure and monitored temperature; this recipe supplies neither.
- The soaked-crumb filler is the weak pointBread crumbs saturated in cooking liquor and packed into a sealed casing give a high-moisture, protein-rich, oxygen-poor core. That is a poor medium to hold at smokehouse warmth, and it may well be part of why the original itself says the sausages "will not keep very long" — though the recipe gives no reason of its own.
- "Smoke them of a yellowish colour"Colour tells you nothing about internal temperature. In a Victorian smokehouse this may have meant hours of gentle warm smoke; interpreted in a modern smoker it can produce a product that has spent a long time lukewarm with no check at all on its finishing temperature.
- Cow's udder fatUdder was a standard cheap fat and connective tissue in German and Austrian butchery and appears in old sausage and pie recipes. It is not sold at retail in most countries now and is not a substitutable ingredient — it behaves quite differently from back fat.
- Ox entrailsBeef middles and rounds do exist commercially, but they arrive salted and require thorough soaking and flushing. Cleaning intestines from scratch at home, as the original assumes, is not a domestic operation any more.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for a cooked beef sausage from a source that gives cure weights and internal temperatures. The eating suggestions here — warmed with cabbage, or fried in butter — belong to that sausage just as well.
Westphalia, in north-west Germany, built its reputation on smoke: the region's hams were cured and smoked over beechwood and juniper and were exported across Europe by the eighteenth century, so "Westphalian" on an English bill of fare was shorthand for something dark, dry and smoke-scented. This sausage belongs to the thriftier end of the same tradition — boiled lean beef, udder fat, and bread crumbs soaked in the cooking broth so that nothing of the pot is wasted, seasoned in the German manner with cloves as well as pepper. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, assembled in the 1870s from a wide sweep of continental and English sources, carried a great many such entries: recipes copied from foreign household books. The candid closing line — that they will not keep very long — sets this sausage apart from the keeping meats of the smokehouse.