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Large Smoked Sausages or Polonies (Season fat and lean pork)
347. 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 cach link about eight or nine inches long.
This is a cold-smoked, air-dried cured sausage of the sort a nineteenth-century household made in a chimney or smokehouse. Read it as a historical document; the method has no place in a modern kitchen.
- No quantities at allSalt and saltpetre are given without any weight against the weight of the pork. Curing salts must be measured to the gram against the meat; guessing means either a failed cure or a nitrite dose well above the legal and safe limit.
- SaltpetrePotassium nitrate was the standard curing agent of the period. Modern curing uses precisely blended nitrite/nitrate mixes at fixed rates precisely because unmeasured nitrate is both unreliable as a preservative and hazardous in excess.
- The smoke is cold, not cookedHanging "as you would hams" implies smoke at ambient or near-ambient temperature over days. The pork never reaches a temperature that kills pathogens, and the six days before cutting are spent under an unmeasured salt rub at whatever temperature the larder happened to be.
- Eaten raw"Some eat it without boiling" is the crux. A dry-cured sausage intended for raw consumption depends on measured salt and nitrite levels, controlled humidity, monitored water-activity loss and a known pH drop. None of that is present here.
- Ox-gut casingBeef middles and bungs are still sold, but the recipe's home scouring, salting and soaking of fresh intestine is an uncontrolled process with no described standard for when the gut is clean enough. Commercial casings arrive already cleaned and salted.
- If you want smoked sausageUse a current, tested recipe from a source that specifies cure weights, meat weights, target internal temperature and drying conditions. Nothing in this entry can be adjusted into that.
- Scale, for contextThe eight- or nine-inch links are specified, and an ox-gut casing suggests something well thicker than a modern breakfast link. The instruction that it "must be high-dried" suggests a sausage meant for keeping.
Polony takes its name from Bologna, filtered through English mouths as "Bologna sausage" and then clipped; the earlier English forms include "Polonia sausage" alongside the later polony. By the time this book appeared, polony in Britain usually meant a large, smoked or scalded sausage sold by the length and sliced cold, and the word survives in that sense in South Africa and parts of northern England. The recipe belongs to the older domestic pig-killing calendar: a household salted down a carcass in cold weather, and what could not be used as ham, bacon or brawn went into gut casings and up the chimney. The instruction to smoke it "as you would hams" assumes the reader already has a hanging place and knows the rhythm of it, which is why so little is specified. Note too the shalot or garlic worked in as fine as possible, and the note that some ate it uncooked.