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Seasoning for Sausage
To every twelve pounds of meat, one-third fat and twothirds lean, eight level spoonfuls of salt, seven of sage, five or six of black pepper, one of brown sugar, half teaspoonful ginger.
This is a seasoning formula rather than a full method: it gives proportions for fresh (uncured) country sausage and assumes the cook already knows how to grind and stuff. A few things need pinning down before you scale it.
- "Spoonfuls" is genuinely ambiguousNineteenth-century books used "spoonful" for both the tablespoon and, less often, the dessert or tea spoon. Eight level tablespoons of salt in 12 lb of meat works out near 2.6 percent by weight, which is saltier than most modern palates want; eight teaspoons is under 1 percent, which is bland. Current practice for fresh sausage is 1.5 to 2 percent salt by weight of meat, and weighing is more reliable than any conversion here.
- The fat ratio is the part to keepOne-third fat to two-thirds lean sits at the rich end of the usual range for fresh pork sausage (70/30 and 75/25 are both common) and is a large part of why this formula works. Much below about a quarter fat the patties tend to come out dry and crumbly however well seasoned.
- Sage means dried rubbed sageSage means dried sage leaf -- Seven spoonfuls of the fluffy rubbed leaf is a very different quantity from seven of ground sage, which is denser and much stronger. A period kitchen drying its own sage would most likely have had it in rubbed rather than finely ground form; if using ground, start with about half.
- Test before you commitMix the seasoning through the ground meat, fry a small patty, taste, and adjust the whole batch. Raw sausage meat cannot be judged by smell alone, and salt and sage both read differently once cooked.
- No cure in this mixtureThere is no saltpetre or nitrite here, so this is fresh sausage only. It should be treated like any raw ground pork: kept refrigerated, used within a couple of days or frozen, and cooked through to 160F. It is not suitable for hanging, air-drying or cold-smoking.
- Scaling downThe recipe is written as a ratio, "to every twelve pounds," so it is meant to be multiplied or divided freely. For a 2 lb trial batch divide everything by six, which makes the teaspoon-versus-tablespoon question a small experiment rather than an expensive one.
- Grind and mix coldKeep the meat and fat near freezing through grinding and mixing. Warm fat smears rather than cutting cleanly, and smeared sausage renders greasy in the pan.
Sausage seasoning formulas of this kind appear in many American general-purpose cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they are often found in the miscellaneous or farm chapters rather than among the made dishes, because they belonged to hog-killing time rather than to daily cooking. The proportions here heheavy on sage, moderate on black pepper, a token of brown sugar and a whisper of ginger ecAmerican country or breakfast sausage, distinct from the caraway and marjoram of central European traditions. Sage dominates, it is often said, because it was among the strong herbs most kitchen gardens grew and dried in quantity, and it happens to suit fresh pork fat particularly well. That the recipe gives its proportions "to every twelve pounds," and gives no instruction for grinding, stuffing or storing, suggests the reader was expected to be doing this at scale in cold weather, with the rest of the animal being salted, smoked or rendered on the same day.