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Frankfort Sausages
Mince fine equal quantities of fat and lean pork; season with salt and pepper to taste, and coriander seed with a little grated nutmeg. (If preferred, use powdered sage in place of the coriander seed and nutmeg.) Fill thoroughly cleansed skins, that have been soaked in cold salt water, with the sausage meat; fasten the ends securely, and let them hang in a dry, cool place till wanted.
The mincing and seasoning here are sound, but the finish -- raw pork in a casing hung in a cool room until wanted -- belongs to a world of cold larders, uninspected home slaughter, and no expectation that the sausage would keep more than a day or two. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen.
- The hanging step is the failureThis is a fresh, uncooked, uncured sausage. Hanging raw pork in a casing at ambient temperature lets spoilage organisms and pathogens multiply, and the low-oxygen interior of a casing with no acid and no nitrite is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. A genuine dry-cured sausage requires a measured curing salt, a measured salt percentage, controlled humidity, and a target water activity, none of which appear here.
- No salt quantity is given"Salt and pepper to taste" is adequate for something eaten the same day and meaningless for preservation. Curing salt levels are calculated as a percentage of meat weight, not judged by tasting raw pork.
- Raw pork tastingSeasoning "to taste" in a raw pork mixture may mean sampling it uncooked rather than frying off a test piece. Trichinella is rare in commercial pork now but Salmonella and Yersinia are not, and neither is worth the risk for a seasoning check.
- Natural casings todayCasings sold now arrive packed in salt or brine and are rinsed and soaked before use, so the recipe's soaking instruction is already standard practice. That is the one part of the method that has survived unchanged.
- What the seasoning tells youCoriander and nutmeg, with sage offered as an alternative, is a plain fresh-sausage blend rather than a frankfurter formula -- no cure, no smoke, no emulsified paste. Read it as a period seasoning note, not as a working method.
- If you want to make theseUse a current sausage-making recipe with stated cure quantities, weights and temperatures, or make it as a fresh sausage cooked to a measured internal temperature the same day.