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Smoked Sausages or Polonies
common chopper and board, or with a sausage-making machine, which last acts remarkably well, but is not required often enough in private houses to warrant its purchase. They are afterwards put into properly cleaned lengths of the entrails of the ox, sheep, calf, or pig, and tied at short intervals with common fine string. In cleaning the entrails they are turned inside out, stretched on a smooth stick, and well scraped and washed in several waters.
What survives here is the mechanical part of sausage-making: mincing the meat, filling the casings, and cleaning the gut. The curing and smoking that make a polony a polony are not specified, and that omission is the reason this cannot be followed today.
- No cure is givenSmoked sausages of this type were generally preserved with salt and saltpetre, but no quantities appear anywhere in this fragment. Cured, smoked sausage made without a measured nitrite level and a controlled temperature carries a real risk of Clostridium botulinum, which thrives in exactly these conditions: low oxygen, moderate salt, gentle warmth. Use a current, tested formula if you want to make smoked sausage.
- No smoking temperature or timeThe text stops before the smokehouse. Cold-smoking holds meat below roughly 90F for hours or longer, which is within the bacterial growth zone and only safe when the cure and the humidity are controlled by number. Nothing in this fragment supplies either.
- Casings are no longer a home jobCasings are rarely a home job now -- Turning, scraping and washing ox or hog gut was normal kitchen work when the butcher sold the whole animal. Natural casings today come packed in salt: rinse them, soak in cool water for half an hour, and flush a little water through each length to open it before filling.
- The sausage machineThe author dismisses one as too rarely used to buy. Modern equivalents are the grinder attachment for a stand mixer with a stuffing horn, or a hand-cranked stuffer. Both do the job the chopper and board did, and keeping the meat and equipment near-freezing prevents the fat smearing.
- Chopper and boardHand-chopping on a board gives a coarser, more variable grain than a plate grinder. If you chop by hand, keep the meat very cold and work in small batches.
- TyingFor "common fine string" use undyed cotton butcher's twine. Link at short intervals and prick any air pockets before hanging, or the casing can split when heat reaches it.