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Bologna Sausages
Chop fine one pound each of beef, veal, pork and rather fat bacon; mix well with the above ingredients three-fourths of a pound of beef suet, also chopped fine, and season with sage, sweet herbs, salt and pepper. Press the mixture into a large-skin, tie it tightly at both ends and prick it in several places. Put the sausage into a saucepan, cover it with boiling water and let it boil slowly for an hour. When cooked place the sausage on straw to drain.
A fresh boiled sausage rather than a cured one, and the text as printed leans on the cook to supply amounts the book never states. A few decisions have to be made before you begin.
- "The above ingredients"The phrase points back to the four meats just chopped in the opening clause (beef, veal, pork and fat bacon), to which the suet is then added. Read the formula as those meats, the suet and the seasonings listed here, and nothing more.
- Seasoning quantitiesSage, sweet herbs, salt and pepper are given without measure. For a 4 3/4 lb mix, salt at about 1.5 percent by weight (roughly 1 1/4 oz, or 2 tablespoons fine salt) is the standard modern rate; 2 to 3 teaspoons dried sage and 2 teaspoons black pepper are in period character. Fry a small patty to taste before filling the casing.
- Chopping"Chop fine" meant hand work with a knife or a hand-cranked mincer. A grinder on the coarse plate, run twice, gives the right texture; a food processor turns the fat to paste and the sausage will be crumbly.
- The "large-skin"A beef middle or beef bung, about 2 1/2 to 4 inches across, sold by butchers and sausage suppliers as natural casing. Soak and flush it first. Hog casings are too narrow for a sausage meant to be sliced like bologna.
- Do not actually boil itA rolling boil bursts a large casing and renders out the suet, leaving a dry, hollow sausage. Hold the water at 175-185F and poach until the centre reads 160F on a thermometer, which in a 3-inch casing takes appreciably longer than the hour given here.
- PrickingThe pricking is there to let steam escape so the skin does not split. Use a fine needle in a few places only; a heavily punctured casing weeps fat and juice into the pot.
- Straw, and coolingStraw was simply a clean draining surface. A rack over a tray does the same. Chill the sausage promptly rather than leaving it at room temperature to cool slowly.
- KeepingThere is no nitrite, no smoking and no drying here, so this is not a shelf-stable bologna. Treat it as cooked fresh sausage: refrigerate and use within three or four days, or freeze.
- YieldJust under five pounds of mix, enough for a dozen or more as a sliced cold meat.
Bologna takes its name from the Italian city and its Emilian sausage mortadella, a finely emulsified pork sausage flecked with fat that European and American butchers imitated under the anglicised name through the nineteenth century. What the recipe sets down is the older, homelier branch of the family: a large-calibre sausage of mixed meats, heavily fattened with suet and bacon, poached whole and eaten cold in slices, closer to a British or German household sausage than to anything sold today in a deli. The mixture of beef, veal, pork and bacon in one casing was normal in an era when a kitchen broke down whole carcasses and had trimmings of several kinds on hand at once; sage as the dominant seasoning is likewise a hallmark of English-language sausage recipes of the period. The instruction to drain on straw is often taken as a survival from a time before wire racks, when clean straw is said to have served as a ready surface for cooling cheeses, breads and boiled meats.