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Ham Sausages
Mince about five pounds of unsmoked ham fine, if in cold weather, one pound of hog's leaf, or inner pork fat, and cut it into small squares. Season the mince with three ounces of salt, one-half ounce of coarsely ground black pepper, a few whole peppercorns, and one-half teaspoonful of saltpetre. Mix the seasoning well into the mince and moisten it slowly with two or three tablespoonfuls of rum or port wine, then mix in the fat. Cover the mixture and leave it for a few hours. Cleanse well and prepare some skins, tie them round the bottom, then pass the mixture through them into a funnel. When the skins are well filled tie them into lengths about one and one-half feet in length. In about twelve hours time tie the sausages closer if possible, and bind them round from one end to the other with broad tape; fasten the tape well at the ends. Hang the sausages for nearly two weeks in cool smoke, then remove them from the smoke and place them in a cool, dry place until wanted. When the sausages are filled care should be taken that no air spaces are left; should there be any they should be pricked through with a long, thin iron skewer.
This is a dry-cured, cold-smoked sausage that is never cooked at any stage — it is preserved entirely by salt, nitrate and slow drying. The proportions and conditions given here fall well outside what modern curing practice considers controllable, and the finished product was intended to be eaten without further cooking.
- The saltpetre is unmeasurableHalf a teaspoon of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) against roughly six pounds of meat and fat is a volume measure of a substance that varies in density and purity, and nitrate must be converted by bacteria to nitrite before it protects anything. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite salt mixes at strictly defined parts per million; there is no way to know from this text whether the dose lands under, at, or over the safe range.
- Cold smoke is not cooking"Cool smoke" for two weeks holds the meat in the temperature band where Clostridium botulinum and Staphylococcus aureus multiply if the cure is inadequate. Smoke flavours and dries the surface; it does not pasteurise the interior. Nothing in this recipe ever reaches a temperature that kills pathogens.
- No fermentation controlUncooked dry sausage relies on a rapid pH drop and a steady loss of water weight, monitored by scale and pH meter. This recipe specifies neither a starter culture nor a target weight loss nor a humidity, and "a cool, dry place" in a 1896 hotel cellar is not a figure anyone can reproduce.
- Air pockets and the skewerThe instruction to prick out air spaces is sound in principle — voids are where anaerobic spoilage takes hold — but it is the only hazard control in the whole method, and it addresses the least of the risks here.
- Hog's leafLeaf lard is the firm inner fat from around the kidneys, prized for its clean flavour. It is still sold by some butchers, usually rendered; the raw sheet is generally a special order.
- Unsmoked hamThis most likely means the fresh hind leg of the pig rather than the cured pink ham of a deli counter, since the recipe supplies its own salt and saltpetre. Substituting already-cured ham into any adaptation would compound the salt and nitrate already present.
- If you want to make dry sausageUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure weights in grams per kilogram, a target water-activity or weight-loss figure, and specified fermentation and drying conditions.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) ran to over nine hundred pages and was as much a reference for a professional kitchen as a domestic manual, which is why it carries whole-hog charcuterie alongside soufflés and hotel salads. Hotel kitchens of the period often cured and smoked meat on the premises, and the recipe's own qualifier "if in cold weather" suggests the work depended on ambient cool. Saltpetre had been the standard preserving salt in European butchery for centuries before anyone understood that it works by breaking down to nitrite; that chemistry was only worked out from the 1890s onwards, and the safe-dose arithmetic that governs curing today came later still. The tape binding, wound the length of the sausage, would have kept the casing tight against the shrinking meat as it dried.