Bologna Sausage

This is a seasoning formula for a cured, casing-stuffed sausage, and everything that would make it safe has been left out. The points below explain what is missing rather than how to supply it.

• No curing agentNineteenth-century bologna was a cured sausage, stuffed into large casings and then smoked or air-dried, often eaten without further cooking. This formula calls for salt and spice only — no saltpetre, no nitrite — so nothing in it inhibits Clostridium botulinum inside the anaerobic interior of a stuffed casing.
• No temperature anywhereThere is no smoking temperature, no drying temperature, no internal finishing temperature, and no holding time. A 14-pound batch of chopped meat handled at room temperature and then held in a warm smokehouse is a growth window for Staphylococcus aureus and salmonella, and the recipe gives no way to close it.
• Salt is seasoning, not preservationSix ounces of salt in 14 pounds of meat is roughly 2.7 percent by weight. That is a good eating level and it is well short of what would preserve an uncooked sausage on its own, which is the whole premise of a bologna.
• Ground meat is not a whole cutChopping spreads surface bacteria through the entire mass, so the mixture cannot be treated the way a whole roast is. A modern recipe with weighed cure, measured drying humidity and a verified internal temperature should be used instead.
• Historic unitsWeights here are avoirdupois and translate directly — six ounces of salt is by weight, not volume, and "fine salt" most likely means finely milled salt rather than the coarse dairy or bay salt sold in barrels. "Sage to the taste" is the only unmeasured element in the formula.
• The absent stepNote what the entry never says: how to stuff, how long to hang, or how to know when it is done. The terseness suggests a reader presumed to know the rest of the process already. That assumed knowledge is exactly the part a modern kitchen does not have.