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Smoked Sausages
Mix with ten pounds of fine-chopped beef, one teacupful of salt and one pinch of saltpetre, add four pounds of chopped pork and two pounds of chopped fat bacon; season the meat with eight ounces of cumin, four ounces of pepper, two ounces of pimento, all of which must be ground. Peel and chop a few cloves of garlic, mix them with the above ingredients and chop all together for a few minutes longer, adding by degrees at the same time one pint of water. Fill some pig's intestines with the mixture, tie them into small sausages and smoke them for a few hours. Boil the sausages for five minutes then drain them cool.
This is a hotel butchery formula from an era when a large kitchen cured and smoked its own sausage daily and no one measured curing salts by weight. It cannot be reproduced safely as written, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to correct it.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured"One pinch" of saltpetre for sixteen pounds of meat is not a quantity. Potassium nitrate has to be dosed by weight against the weight of the meat, and modern practice has largely replaced it with measured sodium nitrite cures precisely because eyeballed nitrate gives both under-cured sausage and, at the other extreme, a genuinely toxic dose. There is no way to read a safe number out of this line.
- Smoking at an unstated temperature"Smoke them for a few hours" says nothing about heat. Raw ground pork and beef held for hours somewhere between warm and ambient is the textbook condition for Clostridium perfringens and staphylococcal growth, and in a sealed casing with inadequate nitrite, for Clostridium botulinum. The whole safety of a smoked sausage rests on the smokehouse temperature and the cure level, and this recipe specifies neither.
- Five minutes of boiling is not a cookA boil of five minutes will not bring the centre of a filled hog casing to a safe temperature, and the recipe then drains and cools them for keeping. The finished sausage is neither properly cured nor properly cooked, which is the worst of both.
- If you want to make sausageUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure weights in grams per kilogram of meat, a smokehouse temperature schedule, and a target internal temperature. Read this page as a document of how the Waldorf larder worked, not as instructions.
- Reading the archaic measuresA teacupful in this period was commonly reckoned at four to six fluid ounces, so somewhere under a cup of salt; "pimento" here is allspice, not sweet pepper or pimiento. Eight ounces of ground cumin to sixteen pounds of meat is a very heavy hand by modern taste.
- ScaleThe batch is sixteen pounds of meat plus a pint of water, which would have filled several yards of hog casing. The recipe gives no reduced quantities for a household.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book ran to nearly a thousand pages because it was meant to document an entire hotel operation, not just its dining room, and the section this comes from records work that happened out of sight: butchery, curing, stock-making, the daily grind of a kitchen that bought whole carcasses and used every part of them. A smoked sausage bound with beef, pork and fat bacon and seasoned with cumin, allspice, pepper and garlic belongs to the central European charcuterie tradition that German and Austrian cooks are often said to have brought into American hotel kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, and Oscar himself was Swiss-born. The instruction to smoke briefly and then boil marks it as a fresh-eating sausage rather than a long-keeping dry one. It also shows how much of preservation was still craft knowledge in 1896: the pinch of saltpetre and the few hours of smoke meant something precise to the man at the block, and nothing at all on the page.