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Sausage (Seven pounds of lean pork one)
Seven pounds of lean pork, one pound and three quarters of fat, twenty-one teaspoonfuls of sage, seven of pepper, seven of salt; grind the meat, fat and lean, in a sausage mill, or chop it very fine; mix the seasoning in with your hands, taste, to be sure all is right, and pack down in stone jars, pouring melted lard on top. Another good way of preserving them is, to make long, narrow bags of stout muslin, large enough to contain, each, enough sausage for a family dish; fill these with the meat, dip in melted lard and hang in a cold room. Some prefer seasoning of sweet marjoram and thyme, mixed cayenne, nutmeg, lemon and sage; season to taste.
This is a fresh, uncured country sausage from the annual hog-killing, and its two storage methods — potted under lard, or bagged in muslin and hung in a cold room — are the parts that no longer stand up. The seasoning ratios are historically interesting; the handling is not.
- Tasting the raw mixture"Taste, to be sure all is right" means tasting raw pork. Trichinella is far rarer in commercial pork than it was in 1900, but raw pork also carries Salmonella, Yersinia enterocolitica and Toxoplasma. Seasoning of a raw meat mix is checked today by frying a small test patty through.
- No cure, no measured saltSeven teaspoonfuls of salt to nearly nine pounds of meat works out somewhere between about 0.5 and 1 percent by weight, depending on how coarse the salt is — a seasoning level, not a preserving level. There is no nitrite, no nitrate, no sugar and no acidification. Nothing in this formula inhibits Clostridium botulinum or the ordinary spoilage flora.
- Lard sealing is an anaerobic sealPouring melted lard over potted meat excludes oxygen, which is exactly the condition botulinum spores favour. In a cold cellar it worked well enough often enough to stay in print; it is not a control that can be relied on, and the hazard is odourless and tasteless.
- "A cold room" is not a temperatureThe muslin-bag method depends entirely on an unheated winter larder in a house without central heating, and on the sausage being eaten within weeks. No temperature is specified and none can be assumed. Uncured raw pork hung above refrigeration temperature is unsafe on any timescale.
- If you want this sausageThe seasoning profile — heavy sage, black pepper, salt, sometimes marjoram, thyme, cayenne, nutmeg and lemon — is worth keeping. Use a current fresh-sausage recipe with modern refrigeration or freezing, and follow its handling instructions rather than these.
- On the fat ratioOne pound three quarters of fat to seven pounds of lean is about 20 percent fat, which is lean by modern sausage standards; much fresh pork sausage today runs higher.
Recipes like this one belong to the hog-killing calendar rather than to the kitchen year: a farm family butchered in the first hard cold of late autumn, and the whole animal had to be turned into something that would keep before the weather turned. Hams and bacon went to the smokehouse or the salt barrel; the odd trim, too small and too soft to cure whole, was ground with sage and pepper into sausage. Sage is often said to be the characteristic American seasoning for it, and the proportion here — three teaspoonfuls per pound of lean — is generous even by traditional standards. The two keeping methods are both pre-refrigeration standbys: potting under a lard seal, the same principle as French confit and English potted meats, and the muslin bag dipped in lard, which the recipe offers simply as another good way of preserving them. The closing line, offering marjoram, thyme, cayenne, nutmeg and lemon as alternatives, is a reminder that sausage seasoning was regional and family-specific long before it was commercial; the cookbook is recording a practice, not prescribing one.