Sausage Meat
25 pounds lean pieces cut from the shoulder and tender-loin. 15 pounds fat from the back of the chine. 1 pound salt; a half pound of black pepper. 4 ounces allspice. 1 ounce sage.
Cut the fat in small pieces and then chop it; chop the lean very fine: mix all together, kneading in the seasoning. Press it down in small pots and pour melted lard over the top.--Mrs. J. D.
This is a hog-killing-day recipe: forty pounds of fresh pork seasoned and then held in crocks under a lard seal. The mixing is ordinary charcuterie practice; the storage is what makes it unusable today.
- Why the lard seal failsRaw ground pork pressed into pots and capped with melted lard is held in an oxygen-poor environment at ambient temperature. That is the condition Clostridium botulinum exploits, and nothing in this formula stops it: there is no nitrite, no smoke, no cooking step, and no acid. Fresh sausage meat kept this way is not a cured product, only a sealed one.
- The salt is seasoning, not preservationOne pound of salt to forty pounds of meat is about 2.5 percent — a good flavour level for fresh sausage, and far below the concentration and time needed to preserve raw pork. Nothing in the recipe suggests a cure long or strong enough for shelf storage.
- No saltpetre or cureRecipes of this era that were genuinely intended to keep often called for saltpetre or a long dry cure. This one does not, though it does direct that the meat be potted and sealed. Use a current, tested recipe if you want sausage that keeps.
- "Fat from the back of the chine"The chine is the backbone; the fat along it is hard back fat, the firm fat charcutiers still prefer because it stays in distinct particles rather than smearing. Modern pork carries far less of it, and a butcher will usually have to be asked for it specially.
- The fat ratioFifteen pounds fat to twenty-five pounds lean is roughly 37 percent fat — high by today's habits but typical of nineteenth-century farm sausage, where the fat was both flavour and calories and the meat came from an older, leaner hog.
- The pepper is not a misprintHalf a pound of black pepper in forty pounds of meat is about 1.25 percent, several times what most current sausage formulas use. The four ounces of allspice against a single ounce of sage make for an equally heavy hand with the aromatics.
- Chopping, not grinding"Chop the lean very fine" means knife or chopping-bowl work, which leaves an irregular texture quite unlike plate-ground meat. Keeping meat and fat cold during chopping helps the fat stay in distinct particles.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like this "Mrs. J. D.", records the domestic year of the Virginia household, and sausage meat belongs firmly to its coldest part. Hogs were killed after the first hard frosts of November or December, when the weather itself did the refrigerating, and the whole animal was disposed of in a few days: hams and shoulders to the salt and the smokehouse, lard rendered from the leaf fat, scraps and trimmings chopped for sausage. Potting under a lard seal was one common way to hold that sausage through the winter, and the same trick was used for cooked meats across Britain and the American South. The heavy hand with black pepper, allspice and sage is characteristic of Virginia country sausage, a seasoning profile that survives in commercial "sage sausage" today, though at a fraction of the spice this book calls for.