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To Season Sausage
To every twelve pounds of meat, nine tablespoonfuls of salt, nine tablespoonfuls of sage, six tablespoonfuls of black pepper, one tablespoonful of brown sugar, one teaspoonful of ginger.
This is a seasoning formula rather than a full method: it assumes you already have twelve pounds of ground fresh pork in front of you and only need to know what goes into it. A few of the proportions reflect nineteenth-century keeping practice rather than modern taste.
- What it makesTwelve pounds of meat is a hog-killing quantity. For a normal batch, divide everything by twelve and you get a per-pound rate: about 3/4 tablespoon salt, 3/4 tablespoon sage, 1/2 tablespoon black pepper, and a pinch each of brown sugar and ginger.
- The salt is highNine tablespoons of table salt is roughly 5 1/2 to 6 ounces, close to 3 percent of the meat's weight. That was partly preservation — sausage was packed in crocks under lard and eaten over weeks. For sausage you will cook and eat within a few days, 1.5 to 2 percent (about 1/2 tablespoon fine salt per pound) tastes better. Coarse kosher salt measures lighter by volume than table salt, so weigh if you can.
- Sage means dried rubbed sageNine tablespoons of the fluffy rubbed leaf is not the same as nine tablespoons of powdered sage, which packs far heavier and will turn the meat bitter and medicinal. Use rubbed. This is emphatically a sage sausage; if you want it subtler, halve it.
- PepperSix tablespoons over twelve pounds works out to a distinctly peppery country sausage. Freshly ground coarse black pepper is closer to what the period intended than pre-ground dust.
- Fat matters more than seasoningThe formula says nothing about the meat at all; a home-butchered hog's trimmings are the likeliest assumption behind it. Aim for about 25 to 30 percent fat — shoulder alone is roughly right. Leaner than that and no amount of sage will save the texture.
- Mix cold, then testKeep the meat near freezing while mixing so the fat does not smear. Work the seasoning through thoroughly, then fry a small patty and taste before committing the batch.
- This is fresh sausage, not curedThere is no nitrate or nitrite here, so nothing about this mixture makes it shelf-stable. Refrigerate and cook within two days or freeze, and cook to 160F throughout.
Formulas like this one appear in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks as bare seasoning tables because the rest of the process needed no explanation: in a rural household the hog was killed in cold weather, the hams and sides went to the smokehouse, and the trimmings were ground for sausage the same week. What the cook needed from a book was the ratio. The heavy hand with sage is characteristic of English and Anglo-American farmhouse sausage — the pairing of pork with sage is long established in English cookery — while the ginger and brown sugar are small warming touches found in period receipts. The twelve-pound unit is itself a clue to scale: this is a recipe for a family laying in a winter's worth of breakfast, not for a pound of sausage from the butcher.