No. 68

Chopped Forcemeat for Ordinary Sausages

Farce Hachis pour Saucisses Ordinaires

Prepare a pound of lean, nerveless pork-meat and a pound of fat from the pig's throat; chop them up very fine, and season with three-quarters of an ounce of salt, black pepper and red pepper; when thoroughly chopped and a compact paste is formed, then mix in half a gill of water.

Another Way.—Remove the sinews from four pounds of lean fresh pork, taken from the shoulder or neck; add the same weight of not too mellow fat, from under the chine; chop together, season with a third of an ounce of salt for each pound, black pepper and red pepper to taste.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two versions of the same thing: a plain fresh pork sausage meat, half lean and half fat, seasoned only with salt and two peppers. Everything depends on temperature and on the fat-to-lean ratio, which is the point of the recipe.

Keep everything coldThis is the hinge. Meat and fat should be near freezing when chopped, and the bowl and blades chilled. If the fat warms and smears, it renders out in the pan and leaves a dry, crumbly sausage instead of a juicy one.
"Nerveless" and "remove the sinews"Both mean trimmed of silverskin, gristle and connective tissue. Hand-chopping or grinding will not break these down; they show up as chewy threads in the finished sausage.
The two fats namedFat "from the pig's throat" is jowl fat, soft and well-flavoured; fat "from under the chine" is most likely a firm loin or back fat, which may be what "not too mellow" is asking for. Either works, but firmer fat holds its shape better in a coarse grind. A butcher will sell you either; plain fatback is the easiest substitute.
A gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is a quarter cup. The water is not padding: it helps the salt draw out protein so the paste binds.
Salt levelsThe first version gives three-quarters of an ounce to two pounds, roughly 2.3 percent, and the second a third of an ounce per pound, about 2 percent. Both are at the top of the modern range for fresh sausage, which usually sits between 1.5 and 2 percent. Weigh the salt rather than measuring by spoon, since a given volume of flake or kosher salt weighs far less than table salt.
Chopping versus grindingRanhofer means a knife or a chopping bowl. A grinder with a coarse plate gives a comparable texture in less time; work in two passes if you want it finer, keeping the meat cold between them.
Test before you commitFry a small patty to check salt and heat, then adjust the rest of the batch. Once seasoned, cook fresh pork sausage through to 160F. This mixture contains no cure, so treat it as fresh meat: use within two days, or freeze.
YieldThe first version makes two pounds of sausage meat, enough for about eight patties or a dozen small links; the second makes eight pounds and is clearly written for a professional kitchen. It scales down cleanly by weight.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, a tenure that came in two spells, roughly 1862-1876 and 1879-1896, and this entry sits in the "Elementary Methods" section among the stocks, aspics and forcemeats that the rest of the book's several thousand recipes lean on. Farce is simply French for stuffing or forcemeat, hachis the noun for hash or mince, and the distinction Ranhofer draws throughout is between smooth pounded forcemeats bound with panada or egg and these coarse chopped ones, held together by nothing but salt, fat and hand work. The roughly equal weights of lean and fat look extravagant now, and stand well clear of the classic charcuterie proportion of two parts lean to one of fat. The red pepper is worth noting: cayenne was a familiar seasoning in nineteenth-century American professional kitchens, and it appears in Ranhofer's pages despite his French training.