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Westphalian Sausages
Use uncooked pork, the fat and lean of which should be as nearly as possible in equal quantities; cut it up into small squares, and for every pound of meat season with one-half ounce of salt and a small quantity of freshly-ground black pepper. Thoroughly clean a number of pig's skins and soak them in cold-salted water for one or two hours. Fill the skins with the sausage mixture and hang them up to smoke. When sufficiently smoked they may be prepared for serving when liked. If the sausages are to be eaten fresh they will be improved by hanging another week in a cool and very dry place.
This is a dry-cured, cold-smoked raw sausage, and the instructions leave out every variable that makes such a product safe. The gaps are specific and worth naming.
- No curing saltThe only preservative here is plain salt, roughly half an ounce per pound, about 3 percent. Modern fermented and cold-smoked raw sausages rely on sodium nitrite (cure #1) or, for longer hangs, sodium nitrate (cure #2) at measured parts per million to suppress Clostridium botulinum in an anaerobic, low-oxygen sausage interior. Salt alone at this level does not do that job.
- Smoking temperature is unstated"Hang them up to smoke" in 1896 meant a smokehouse or chimney at whatever temperature the weather gave. Smoke below about 90F does not cook; smoke between roughly 40F and 130F holds the meat in the bacterial growth range for hours or days at a stretch. Without a stated temperature the process is unrepeatable and unverifiable.
- Trichinella and raw porkThe sausage is never brought to any cooking temperature, and the further week of hanging is explicitly for meat "to be eaten fresh." Nineteenth-century pork carried real trichinosis risk; commercial pork today is far safer, but a raw dry-cured product still needs either a validated freezing schedule or a validated cure-and-dry protocol, neither of which appears here.
- No water activity or weight-loss targetGenuine dry sausage is safe because it loses a defined percentage of its green weight and drops below a target water activity. Oscar gives a week in a "cool and very dry place" with no temperature, no humidity, and no finished-weight check.
- Casings"Pig's skins" here is almost certainly cleaned natural hog casings rather than the rind, given that they are filled with the mixture. These are sold today packed in salt and are rinsed and soaked before use, which is the one instruction in the original that still holds.
- What Westphalian sausage actually isWhat this recipe gives -- A coarse, hand-cut, half-fat pork sausage seasoned with nothing but salt and black pepper, then smoked. With seasoning that plain, the cure has to carry all the safety.
- If you want to make itWork from a current charcuterie reference that specifies cure type and dosage in grams per kilogram, fermentation or drying temperature, humidity, and a target weight loss. Do not scale this text up.
Westphalia, in the northwest of Germany, has been known for smoked pork since long before Oscar Tschirky wrote it down, its hams and sausages traditionally smoked over beechwood and juniper in the region's farmhouse chimneys. Oscar's book is a hotel book, and the presence of a farmhouse curing recipe in it says something about the Waldorf's kitchen in the 1890s: a large hotel of the period still made in-house a great many things a modern kitchen buys in. Tschirky himself was Swiss-born and came up through New York's Delmonico's; recipes like this one sit in his collection less as instructions for a home cook than as a record of what a well-stocked professional cold room was expected to produce.