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Sausages
Mrs. C. Bradley and others.
Six pounds of lean fresh pork, twelve teaspoons of sage, and six teaspoons of pepper, six teaspoons of salt, (and two of cloves, and one nutmeg, if you prefer), grind or chop very fine; mix these ingredients thoroughly, and pack in a jar, and pour hot lard over the top.
The seasoning ratio here is sound farmhouse sausage practice, but the storage method — raw pork packed into a jar and sealed under hot lard — is a preservation technique that cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the numbers and then the specific reason the method fails.
- Why the lard seal failsPouring hot fat over raw ground pork creates exactly the conditions Clostridium botulinum favours: an oxygen-free environment, low acid, and no heat step that reaches a lethal temperature. The fat cap keeps air out, which is the point of the technique and also the hazard. Nothing in the recipe brings the meat to a safe temperature at any stage.
- There is no cure in itSix teaspoons of salt to six pounds of meat is roughly 1.3 percent — a seasoning level, not a preserving level. There is no nitrite, no nitrate, no sugar and no acid. Traditional potted meats of this kind relied on a cold cellar and quick turnover rather than on any measured barrier to spoilage.
- No temperature or time is givenNothing in the recipe states a storage temperature or a keeping time, and both are essential to whether such a pack is safe; a cold larder and fairly quick consumption are presumably taken for granted, but neither is specified. A current, tested recipe should be used for any pork sausage you intend to keep.
- "Lean fresh pork" is the whole of itFresh here means uncured and unsmoked, as opposed to the salt pork and bacon that filled most nineteenth-century pork barrels. Note that no fat is added: modern sausage makers work to 20-30 percent fat, and lean pork alone gives a dry, crumbly result even before the lard is poured over.
- "Grind or chop very fine"The alternative is offered because a household of the period might own a hand-cranked meat grinder or might still be working with a chopping bowl and a two-handled knife. Keeping the meat very cold, close to freezing, is the rule for any ground pork now.
- One nutmegA whole nutmeg grated out is about two teaspoons, so the optional spicing works out to roughly two teaspoons cloves and two of nutmeg across six pounds — restrained by the standards of the period, when sausage spicing often ran to mace, thyme and summer savory as well.
- Sage at this rateTwelve teaspoons of sage in six pounds of meat is a strong, distinctly old-fashioned American sausage flavour. The recipe does not say whether the sage is fresh or dried; if it was home-dried and coarsely rubbed rather than the fine powder sold now, it would have measured considerably bulkier for the same weight.
Recipes like this one sit at the point where cookery and provisioning overlap: hog-killing was late-autumn work, the whole animal had to be dealt with in a few days, and the sausage meat that was not eaten immediately went into stoneware crocks under a seal of rendered fat, or into casings, or was pressed into cakes and covered with lard the same way. Sealing food beneath a layer of fat is very old and appears across Europe the the French confit and the English potted meats work on the same principle and it survived in American household books well past the point when glass jars and pressure canning were available, because it needed no equipment beyond a crock and a cool cellar. The attribution to "Mrs. C. Bradley and others" is characteristic of The Home Cook Book, which was compiled from contributions by named women of Chicago and sold for charity.