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Frankfort Sausages
Any part of the pork may be used for these sausages, having the same quantity of fat that there is lean; mince the meat finely and season it with ground coriander-seeds, salt, pepper and a small quantity of grated nutmeg; the quantity of seasoning may be judged according to that of the meat. Fill the skins (they should have been well cleansed and steeped in cold water, salted, for a few hours), secure them well at the ends, and hang them in a cool dry place until wanted.
This is a dry-cured, air-hung raw pork sausage with no measured salt, no curing salt, no temperature and no time. As written it cannot be made safely; the notes below explain where it fails and what the original terms mean.
- No measured cureThe seasoning is left entirely to the cook's judgement — "the quantity of seasoning may be judged according to that of the meat." Safe dry-curing depends on salt at a known percentage of the meat weight, plus nitrite, both weighed to a gram. Nothing here is quantified.
- Nothing kills the pathogensThe meat is raw, minced, stuffed and hung. Mincing distributes surface bacteria through the whole mass, and no step brings the sausage to a safe temperature or drops the water activity by a controlled amount. Salmonella, Listeria and Staphylococcus aureus all have room to work.
- Botulism specificallyClostridium botulinum can grow in the low-oxygen interior of a stuffed casing. Sodium nitrite is what suppresses it in modern cured sausage, and there is no nitrite in this formula — nor any mention of saltpetre.
- "A cool dry place"The recipe gives no temperature. It assumes a larder or cellar colder and drier than a modern kitchen, of a kind a domestic cook does not have; a refrigerator is too humid and too still for drying. The instruction is not transferable.
- Untreated natural casingsThe recipe assumes casings cleaned and soaked in cold salted water by the kitchen staff. Casings sold today come packed in salt and are rinsed, not disinfected; soaking does nothing to sanitise the sausage.
- Coriander and nutmegThe seasoning points to a German-style rather than an English sausage. Ground coriander seed is a characteristic element of frankfurter and bockwurst seasoning.
- If you want to make frankfurtersUse a current recipe from a source that gives salt and cure #1 as a weighed percentage of meat, an emulsion temperature ceiling, and a cooking or smoking temperature. Do not adapt this one.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was assembled at a moment when New York's grand hotels were absorbing German charcuterie wholesale — the city's German-born population was enormous, and Frankfurt-style sausage was already familiar enough on American streets that Oscar felt no need to explain what it was. What he gives here is not really a Waldorf kitchen procedure so much as a compressed household note: equal fat to lean, coriander and nutmeg, fill, hang. The absence of any cure is worth noticing. Nineteenth-century sausage-making leaned on saltpetre and cold larders; the chemistry of nitrite and C. botulinum was only beginning to be understood around the turn of the century, and the regulatory apparatus that now governs cured meat is often traced to the food-safety scandals of the 1900s and 1910s, though rules specific to nitrite came later. Recipes like this one are a fair record of what a professional kitchen did before that knowledge existed, and a poor set of instructions for anyone working after it.