No. 69

Chopped Forcemeat for Country Sausages with Sage

Farce Hachis pour Saucisses de Campagne a la Sauge

Have three pounds of corn-fed lean pork, free of all its sinews, and one pound of fat pork; cut them both into inch squares, then chop them up finely together, and season with an ounce of salt and a teaspoonful of ground black pepper, a quarter of an ounce of powdered sage, the sixth part of a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper, a bit of powdered saltpetre and a gill of water. Work well together so as to mix thoroughly.

← No. 68 Chopped Forcemeat for Ordinary Sausages Elementary Methods No. 70 Cooked Chopped Forcemeat with Chestnuts and →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a plain fresh country sausage mixture, and almost all of it translates directly — except the one ingredient given no measurement at all. That single omission is why the recipe cannot be followed as printed.

The saltpetre is the problem"A bit of powdered saltpetre" is potassium nitrate, and it is the only ingredient in the formula with no quantity. Nitrate is dosed by weight against the weight of the meat, not by eye; in sufficient quantity it is harmful, and there is no way to read "a bit" as a safe figure. Use a current, measured cured-sausage recipe if you want a nitrate-cured product.
Why it was there at allIn a fresh sausage that is chopped, seasoned and cooked within a day or two, saltpetre would have had little time to do preserving work; its most visible effect is the cured pink colour. Either way it is not load-bearing in this recipe, which is another reason not to improvise a dose of it.
Four pounds is a large batch of raw porkThree pounds lean to one pound fat is a 3:1 ratio held together only by salt at roughly 1.6 percent and a little water. Raw ground pork spoils quickly and the recipe gives no storage or cooking instruction of any kind, no temperature, and no keeping time.
Units, for reading the pageA gill is half a cup. An ounce of salt is about a tablespoon and a half of fine salt, and a quarter ounce of powdered sage is roughly three tablespoons or more of the dried leaf, ground.
"Corn-fed lean pork"Ranhofer is specifying a corn-fed hog, generally fatter than the lean modern commodity pig. The separate pound of fat pork is doing real structural work here rather than being optional.
Chopped, not groundThe instruction is to cube and then chop finely — a knife or a coarse plate, not a fine emulsion. The original asks for the mixture to be worked together thoroughly, but nothing in it calls for reducing the meat to a paste.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) grew out of some three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" section functions as a professional kitchen's internal reference: numbered building blocks — forcemeats, panadas, stocks — that later recipes call on by number. Entry 69 sits between an "ordinary" sausage forcemeat and a cooked chestnut farce. The sage-and-pepper seasoning is closer to the English and American country sausage tradition than to the garlic and wine of French charcuterie; sage with fresh pork is a pairing generally traced to English country cookery and carried into the United States, where it became the defining flavour of breakfast sausage. Saltpetre appears here without a quantity, as it often does in nineteenth-century recipes, before nitrate curing was routinely expressed in measured doses or brought under regulation.