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Seasoning for Sausage
18 pounds meat. 9 pounds back fat. 2 ounces sage. 4 ounces black pepper. 12 ounces salt.--Mrs. J. P.
This is a proportion table rather than a method: a farm-scale seasoning formula for fresh pork sausage, sized for a hog-killing day. The useful thing to take from it is the ratio, which scales down cleanly.
- The ratio, reducedThe whole batch is 27 lb of meat and fat. Per pound of that mixture it works out to about 0.44 oz salt (roughly 2 teaspoons), 0.15 oz black pepper (about 2 teaspoons), and 0.07 oz sage (about 2 g, a teaspoon of ground sage or nearer three of rubbed). For a manageable 5 lb batch: 3 lb 5 oz lean pork, 1 lb 11 oz back fat, 2 1/4 oz salt, 3/4 oz pepper, 3/8 oz sage.
- That is a lot of salt12 ounces on 27 pounds is about 2.8 percent, well above the 1.5-2 percent of most modern fresh-sausage formulas. Salt at that level would also have helped the meat keep in a cool larder or under lard. If the sausage is going into the refrigerator or freezer, 1.5 percent (about 1/4 oz per pound) tastes closer to what a modern palate expects.
- "18 pounds meat"Meaning lean trimmings, not whole pork shoulder. With 9 lb of back fat added, the finished mix is about a third fat, which is high but correct for the period and gives a very juicy sausage. Using ordinary pork shoulder, which is already 20-25 percent fat, cut the added fat to a few pounds at most.
- SageRead this as dried sage. Two ounces of dried leaf is a large volume, so weigh rather than measure by cup; ground sage is denser and more aggressive than rubbed. Fresh sage is not a substitute at these weights.
- No cure hereThere is no saltpetre or sugar in the formula, so this is fresh sausage, not a cured or shelf-stable one. Grind, mix, and treat it as raw ground pork: refrigerated a couple of days at most, or frozen, and cooked through to 160F.
- Mix, then taste before committingWork the seasoning through the ground meat thoroughly, then fry a small patty and taste it before stuffing casings or packing it. This is the only reliable check on a formula given by weight for a batch this size, and salt and sage are both easier to add than to remove.
- Let it sitSage and pepper need several hours in contact with the meat to read as sausage rather than as seasoned pork. An overnight rest in the refrigerator before cooking or stuffing makes a noticeable difference.
Sausage seasoning formulas like this one belong to the annual hog killing, which in Virginia came with the first hard cold of late autumn or early winter, when the weather itself was the refrigeration. Hams and middlings went to the smokehouse; the scraps, trimmings and back fat became sausage, and a household worked through a whole hog's worth of it, which is why Mrs. J. P. thinks in units of eighteen pounds. Salt, black pepper and sage is the standard Southern trio, and the heavy hand with salt reflects a kitchen where sausage might be packed in crocks under a seal of lard and eaten over weeks. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is built from contributions like this one, credited variously, some with full names and some, as here, only by initials, and the terseness is characteristic: the book assumes its readers already know how to grind, stuff and fry, and needs to be told only the proportions.