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Sausages with Onions
(Salsicce alla cipollata) The salsicce alla cipollata are prepared with fresh and lean pork meat and bacon in equal quantity, chopped fine and seasoned with salt, pepper and spices. Add a proportional quantity of onions chopped very fine, not too much, however. Fill with the hash the prepared entrails, tie every two inches to divide the sausages.
A bare-bones formula for fresh Italian sausage, with no weights, no cooking method and no yield. The proportions are the recipe; everything else has to be supplied.
- The hinge: this is fresh sausage, not curedThere is no saltpetre, cure or drying step here, so the links must be refrigerated and cooked through like any raw pork — never hung to air-dry or held at room temperature. Cook to an internal 160F.
- "Bacon" means unsmoked pork fatThe word almost certainly stands in for an unsmoked Italian pork fat such as lardo or pancetta rather than the smoked, sugar-cured breakfast bacon of an American supermarket. Equal quantities of lean and fat, as the recipe has it, gives a very rich sausage; around 70 percent lean shoulder to 30 percent back fat is closer to what modern palates expect.
- Salt, since none is specifiedStandard practice is 1.5 to 2 percent of the total meat weight in salt — about 2 to 3 teaspoons of fine salt per 2 lb of meat and fat. Fry a small patty and taste before stuffing.
- "Spices"Spezie is a generic term, and in Italian cookery of this sort it often points to a warm mix along the lines of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon, sometimes with a little mace. A generous pinch of each per 2 lb is the likely scale, not a spoonful.
- The onionThe warning against too much onion is practical: raw onion holds water, weakens the bind and sours faster than the meat does. Keep it to roughly 2 oz per 2 lb of meat, chop it to a near-paste, and cook and cool it first if you want the links to keep more than a day or two.
- "The prepared entrails"Cleaned hog casings, 32 to 35 mm, sold salt-packed. Rinse and soak in warm water for half an hour and flush the insides before stuffing.
- Two-inch linksShorter than most sausages sold today, which run four to six inches. Twist rather than cut, prick nothing, and let the stuffed rope rest in the refrigerator uncovered for a few hours so the casings tighten.
- Cooking and yieldAround 2 lb of mixture fills roughly 3 to 4 ft of casing and serves four to six. Cook the links slowly in a heavy pan with a splash of water, then let the water boil off and brown them in their own fat; high heat from the start splits the casings and drives out the fat.
Cipollata is a noun formed from cipolla, and "alla cipollata" means in the onion manner; sausages so named are generally traced to the pork-butchery regions of central Italy, where the trade was a village one and the winter norcineria produced fresh links alongside the salami meant for keeping. That is the key to the recipe's brevity: it belongs to a tradition in which the maker already knew how much salt went into a given weight of meat, so a printed formula only had to record what made this sausage different from the last one, namely the onion. Onion in a fresh sausage is a mark of exactly that — something to be eaten within days, not hung in a cellar. The terse, measureless style of the entry is inherited rather than careless.