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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Remove
Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. When cold, fill the crock with melted lard. Throw over the top a layer of cotton batting, put on the lid, and store in a dark, cool place until required for use.
Or fried sausage can be laid down in the same manner and covered with its own grease.
Or for cooked bologna sausage, grind together 2 pounds each of pork, bacon, beef, and veal free from fat or gristle, and 2 pounds of beef suet.
First cut in small pieces and sprinkle over it before grinding 4 ounces of salt, 6 tablespoonfuls of black pepper, 1 tablespoonful of Cayenne, and pack tightly into beef cases 4 or 5 inches in diameter. Form links about 12 or 15 inches in length, tying at both ends. Prick the skins and boil for about an hour. Hang up to dry for 2 or 3 days and afterwards smoke with hickory wood or corncobs.
Or grind up together with suitable seasoning equal quantities of ham, veal, or pork; or pork and beef.
Cook and smoke as above.
Two preservation methods are folded together here: sealing cooked sausage under a cap of lard in a crock, and making a large batch of boiled, smoked bologna in beef casings. Both belong to a period before refrigeration and before anyone measured curing salts, and neither is safe to reproduce as written. The notes below explain the specific failures.
- Lard sealing creates the wrong conditionsCooked meat packed in a crock and covered with melted fat sits in an oxygen-free environment at room temperature, which is precisely what Clostridium botulinum needs to produce toxin. A "dark, cool place" in a 1900s cellar meant perhaps 50-60F, well inside the growth range, and the lard cap does nothing to prevent it.
- No curing salt is specifiedThe bologna carries 4 ounces of salt to 10 pounds of meat, roughly 2.5 percent, which seasons but does not preserve. There is no saltpetre or nitrite anywhere in the formula, so nothing inhibits botulinum during the hours the sausage spends warm and hanging.
- The smoking step is the largest hazardAfter an hour's boil the links are hung to dry for two or three days and then smoked over hickory or corncobs; the text gives no smoking temperature. That is days of ambient-temperature holding on cooked, uncured, high-moisture meat in a sealed casing. Modern smoked sausage relies on measured nitrite and controlled temperature for exactly this stage.
- No internal temperature is given"Boil for about an hour" for a link 4 to 5 inches across and over a foot long tells you nothing about whether the centre reached a safe temperature. Diameter that large heats slowly and unevenly.
- Beef cases and cotton batting"Beef cases" are large-diameter beef casings; at 4 or 5 inches across these would be bungs rather than middles, and both are still sold to sausage makers. The cotton batting was laid over the lard, presumably as a dust and insect barrier before the lid went on; it has no preservative function.
- Beef suetTwo pounds of hard kidney fat in the mix supplied the firmness and mouthfeel that lean beef and veal alone would not give. Suet is still sold by butchers, though modern sausage formulas normally use pork back fat.
- If you want to make bolognaUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure quantities by weight, casing diameter, and target internal temperature. The ratios and timings on this page cannot be adjusted into safety by eye.
Potting cooked meat under a seal of its own fat is one of the oldest domestic preservation methods in northern Europe, the same principle behind French confit and English potted beef, and it survived in American household manuals well into the twentieth century, when many kitchens still had no mechanical refrigeration. The bologna formula takes its name from Bologna in northern Italy, home of mortadella, the large finely ground pork sausage that European emigrants approximated with whatever meats were cheap locally; the American version's mix of pork, bacon, beef and veal reflects a butcher's economy rather than any Italian original. Corncobs as smoking fuel, mentioned here alongside hickory, were a free by-product on any farm that grew maize.