Home › Bologna Sausages › Bologna Sausages
Bologna Sausages
346. Chop very fine a quarter of a pound veal, a quarter of a pound of salted beef, and a quarter of a pound of salt pork; mince not too fine half a pound of bacon; mix these together, and season with one teaspoonful of sage, three tea-spoonsful of mixed herbs, half a teaspoonful of ground pepper, three tea-spoonsful of mixed spice, fill the skin (a large one), and boil quickly for nearly an hour, prick it, lay it on straw until cold, then hang it up to dry.
This is a preserved sausage, not a fresh one: the brief boil is followed by open-air drying and hanging, and that is where it fails by modern standards. The notes below explain what the method assumes and why it cannot be reproduced safely.
- The hinge: drying without a measured cureThe recipe relies on the salt already in the "salted beef" and "salt pork" to protect a large sausage through days of hanging. No weight of salt, no nitrite or saltpetre quantity, and no ambient temperature or humidity are specified, so there is no way to know whether the interior ever reaches a salt concentration that inhibits Clostridium botulinum. Cured, hung sausage is precisely the product class for which measured cure and controlled conditions were later made mandatory.
- Boiling does not make hanging safeNearly an hour of boiling will cook the meat, but the surface is then re-contaminated by handling, the straw and the air. A cooked, moist, low-acid meat mass held for days in the temperature danger zone favours Staphylococcus aureus, whose toxin is not destroyed by later reheating.
- "Salted beef" and "salt pork" are undefinedBoth were household staples of wildly variable strength, from lightly corned to hard-dry brine-barrel meat. The salt content of the finished sausage could differ substantially between two cooks following this text exactly.
- The skin"A large one" means a natural beef casing, most likely a bung or middle, cleaned at home. Modern equivalents are sold pre-cleaned and salted, but the recipe gives no soaking or rinsing step, which was assumed knowledge.
- Mixed spice and mixed herbsBoth are British compound blends rather than single ingredients: mixed spice is a sweet baking blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, ginger and clove; mixed herbs are dried thyme, marjoram, sage and parsley. Three teaspoons of each in a pound and a quarter of meat is an assertive, distinctly Victorian seasoning.
- ScaleThe total is 1 lb 4 oz of meat, of which half a pound is bacon. That is a single modest sausage, not a batch.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for cured and dried sausage that gives cure weights, target water activity and fermentation or drying temperatures.