Home › Sausages › Mecklenburg Liver Sausages
Mecklenburg Liver Sausages
Take the liver from a pig while it is quite fresh; mince it, and then pass it through a coarse sieve, but first ascertain its weight. To a pound of the liver mix a half-pound of pork (boiled tender) that has been cut from any part of the pig, although slices from the breast are usually taken. Take the tongue, kidneys, and some of the inside fat; chop this meat, but do not mince it, and mix all with the raw liver. Season with salt, pepper, powdered cloves or all-spice, and a few sage-leaves reduced to powder. The top-fat, from the boiling of the meat, and the liquor should both be used. Put the fat, with the meat, into the skins when filling, and boil the sausages in the liquor (salted), which must be made quite hot before they are put in. Plunge them, when cooked, into cold water; then hang them to dry. To be smoked, or not. The skins must be only three-parts filled. Time to boil, half an hour.
This is a working farmhouse Leberwurst from the annual hog killing, written for a household that butchered its own pig and had a cold larder to hang the results in. As given, the procedure cannot be followed safely in a modern kitchen, and the reasons are worth setting out plainly.
- The hanging is the problemCooked sausage is stuffed into casings and then hung to dry at ambient temperature with no measured curing salt and no controlled humidity. Cooked, oxygen-poor, moist meat inside a casing is a recognised environment for Clostridium botulinum; the original presumably depended on a cold winter larder and on prompt eating, neither of which is stated.
- No cure, no measurementThere is no saltpetre or nitrite here at all, and the salt is unquantified — "season with salt" and "the liquor (salted)". Safe curing depends on a weighed percentage of salt and nitrite against the weight of meat. Nothing in this recipe lets you calculate one.
- Smoking is left optional and undefined"To be smoked, or not" gives no temperature and no duration. Warm-smoking an uncured sausage holds it for hours in the 40–140F danger zone, which is precisely the wrong place for a ground liver and offal mixture.
- Half an hour is not a doneness testThe boiling time assumes a particular casing diameter that is never given. Ground liver and offal need a verified internal temperature, not a clock, and the liver goes into the casing raw; the pork is boiled tender beforehand, and the recipe implies the tongue and kidneys come from the same boiling without saying so outright.
- Offal spoils fastLiver, kidney and tongue carry a heavier bacterial load than muscle meat and degrade quickly. "Quite fresh" was doing a great deal of work in a household that butchered its own pig.
- If you want liver sausageUse a current, tested recipe from a source that specifies cure weights, stuffing diameter, internal cooking temperature and refrigerated storage. Read this one as a record of how it was once done.
Mecklenburg, on the Baltic coast of northern Germany, is pork and rye country, and its Leberwurst belongs to the Schlachtfest — the hog-killing feast held once the weather turned cold, when a whole animal had to be converted into keeping food within a day or two. The logic of the recipe is entirely one of thrift: the tongue, kidneys and inside fat go in, the fat skimmed from boiling the meat goes into the casing, and the cooking liquor itself becomes the poaching bath, so nothing from the pig is discarded. That the sausage is boiled rather than raw-cured places it with the soft, cooked northern liver sausages rather than with dry salami.