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Large Smoked Sausages or Polonies (Season fat and lean pork) (II)
485. Season fat and lean pork with some salt, saltpetre, black pepper, and allspice, all in fine powder, and rub into the meat; the sixth day cut it small, and mix with it some shred shalot or garlic, as fine as possible; have ready an ox-gut that has been scoured, salted, and soaked well, and fill it with the above stuffing; tie up the ends, and hang it to smoke as you would hams, but first wrap it in a fold or two of old muslin; it must be high-dried. Some eat it without boiling, but others like it boiled first. The skin should be tied in different places, so as to make each link about eight or nine inches long.
This is an uncured-to-unsafe dry-smoked sausage, and it belongs in the reading pile rather than the kitchen. The notes below explain what the wording means and where the method fails by current standards.
- No quantities anywhereSalt, saltpetre, pepper and allspice are all left to the cook's hand. Curing salts have to be weighed against the weight of the meat to a fraction of a percent; "some salt, saltpetre" gives no way to land inside the safe range, and too little is as dangerous as too much.
- Saltpetre is not modern curing saltPotassium nitrate relies on slow bacterial conversion to nitrite over the six-day rub and the long smoke. Regulated curing preparations today deliver measured sodium nitrite instead, precisely because the older method gives an unpredictable level of protection.
- Cold smoke, not cookingHanging "as you would hams" means smoke at ambient or barely warm temperatures over days. The meat never reaches a temperature that kills pathogens; the only barrier is the cure, and here the cure is unmeasured.
- Stuffed casings and botulismA packed gut is an oxygen-poor environment, which is the specific condition Clostridium botulinum requires. This is why nitrite levels in stuffed, slow-smoked sausage are controlled by law rather than by judgement.
- "Some eat it without boiling"Raw pork carried trichinella risk in the period and can still carry other pathogens. The recipe explicitly offers the uncooked option, which no current guidance would endorse for a home-dried sausage of this kind.
- Ox-gutA beef casing, considerably wider than a pork sausage casing. The eight or nine inch links are produced by tying the skin at intervals, as the recipe directs. A wide casing dries slowly and holds moisture at the centre.
- "High-dried" and the muslinHigh-dried appears to mean smoked hard and long, until the sausage is firm through, though the recipe gives no duration. The muslin wrapping would have kept soot and flies off the casing during the hang.
- ShalotSimply shallot, and "shred" here means finely sliced or minced. If you want the flavour profile, it belongs in a fresh sausage made from a current, tested recipe.