Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pork Sausages
Pork Sausages
After emptying and cleaning thoroughly the intestines of an ox, cut the skins into the necessary lengths and place them in a basin of salted water or a weak solution of lime water and allow them to remain there for three or four days, turning them frequently inside and out. Then remove them from the solution and clean them thoroughly by scraping inside and out and place them in a basin of slightly salted water, letting them remain in it until they are wanted for use, when they are to be well drained. Meanwhile, place ten pounds of pork with a fair quantity of fat in a bowl of pickle and let it remain there for one week, and then remove, drain and mince it very fine, sprinkling over it a quarter of a pound of salt, one ounce of pepper and a little allspice, say about one teaspoonful. Place the sausage meat in the skins, filling them as full as possible and securely tying both ends, wrap muslin around them and smoke them for twelve to fourteen days, then take out and rub well with pepper hanging them in a cold place until they are wanted, when they should be boiled, and when cold, cut into thin slices, and served. Pork Sausages Boiled in White Wine Place in a stewpan half a dozen sausages, together with half a pint of white wine, sprinkling over a small quantity of pepper, set the pan over the fire, covering it over with the lid and boil the contents gently for about eight minutes, then remove the sausages and place them on a dish, add a teacupful of poulette sauce to the liquor and reduce it for four minutes, then take the pan from the fire and stir in an ounce of butter and one tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley. After the butter has melted, pour the liquor over the sausages and serve.
Two recipes run together here: a from-scratch cured and smoked sausage, and a quick braise of finished sausages in white wine. The first cannot be reproduced safely from these directions; the second is a straightforward hotel garnish.
- Why the cure failsThe pork sits in an unspecified "pickle" for a week, then is smoked for twelve to fourteen days at no stated temperature and hung indefinitely in a "cold place." No curing salt, no nitrite quantity, no brine strength and no temperature appear anywhere. A long low-oxygen hold at ambient temperature is precisely the condition Clostridium botulinum exploits, and cold smoking does not pasteurise anything.
- The salt is not enough on its ownA quarter pound of salt to ten pounds of meat is roughly 2.5 percent by weight, and the week in unspecified "pickle" beforehand would have added more salt of unknown quantity. Either way there is no nitrite and no stated brine strength, so the cure cannot be reproduced with any confidence.
- Lime water on the casingsLime solution was used in the nineteenth century as a soak for cleaning and degreasing gut. It is caustic, the concentration here is given only as "weak," and although the casings are scraped and moved to slightly salted water afterwards, no rinse is specified against it. Modern casings arrive cleaned and salt-packed.
- Ox intestinesBeef middles and rounds are still sold to butchers, but a home cook cannot buy raw uncleaned ox gut, and the four-day scraping described is not a procedure worth reviving. If you want to make cured sausage, work from a current recipe with weighed cure #1 and stated fermentation and drying temperatures.
- The white wine sausages are a separate dishThat second paragraph assumes six finished sausages of any decent kind. It is a plain eight-minute braise and needs nothing explained away.
- Poulette sauceA velouté finished with egg yolk, cream and lemon juice. A teacupful in period usage runs somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup; half a pint of wine is one cup. Once the yolk-bound sauce goes in, keep the reduction below a simmer or it will break.
- ServingHalf a dozen sausages in wine serves three as a course, two as a main. The finished dish wants bread or boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893 and published his Cook Book in 1896, at a point when a large hotel kitchen still expected to make its own charcuterie rather than buy it in. The instruction to clean and lime ox intestines is a garde-manger department's routine set down for a domestic audience, and it reads as an artifact of that world more than as practical advice. The finished sausage — hung, then boiled and served cold in thin slices — suggests something closer to a German or Alsatian Schlackwurst than to a breakfast link. The white wine treatment that follows belongs to the French side of the same kitchen: sauce poulette, a lemon-and-yolk velouté, was simply part of the classical French repertoire.