Excellent Recipe for Sausage

This is a seasoning formula rather than a full method: eighteen pounds of pork and a handful of herbs, meant for the day the hog was cut up. Scaled down and treated as fresh sausage, it still works.

• The chineThe chine is the backbone section, and "the lean of the chine" means the meat trimmed from along it — essentially loin and the muscle running beside the spine. Pork shoulder (Boston butt) is the modern equivalent and grinds better; buy it untrimmed and adjust the added fat accordingly.
• The fat ratioSix pounds of fat to twelve of lean is one-third fat by weight, at the rich end of the usual range but what keeps a lean-loin mix from going dry and crumbly. If you are starting from shoulder, which already carries somewhere around a fifth to a quarter of its weight in fat, add far less back fat — enough to reach roughly 30 percent total.
• Scaling downDivide everything by nine for a 2 lb batch: about 1⅔ teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons sage, 1⅔ teaspoons pepper, ⅔ teaspoon thyme, 1 teaspoon marjoram.
• Salt levelFive tablespoons over eighteen pounds works out near 1 percent by weight, which is on the light side for modern palates. Fresh sausage is usually salted at 1.5 to 2 percent; taste a fried test patty before committing the whole batch.
• Dried or fresh herbsTablespoon measures of sage, thyme and marjoram most likely mean dried and rubbed rather than fresh leaves, particularly at hog-killing time in winter. Fresh herbs would need roughly three times the volume, and fresh sage in that quantity would be overwhelming and grassy.
• Mixing"Mix well" is the whole method. Grind the chilled meat and fat coarse, scatter the seasoning over, and work it by hand for a minute or two until the mass turns tacky and clings to itself — that protein bind is what holds a patty together without egg or filler.
• Test before you commitFry a small patty, taste, and correct salt and pepper. Sage-heavy Virginia sausage tastes flat at first and blooms after a night in the refrigerator, so judge it again the next day if you can.
• Keeping and cookingThis is uncured, unsmoked fresh sausage with no nitrite in it. Refrigerate no more than two days or freeze in patties, and cook through to 160F.