🧪 Bad Science 1901

Sausage (Seven pounds of lean pork)

Nine pounds of raw pork, mixed by hand, with the instruction: taste, to be sure all is right.

From: Twentieth Century Cook Book
Published: 1901
Yikes Scale: Yikes

Exactly as printed, 1901

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.

Twentieth Century Cook Book, 1901. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

Tasting means eating raw pork. Trichinella is far rarer in commercial pork than it was in 1900 — feeding practices changed — but it has not vanished, and salmonella has not either.

The salt is the other gap. Seven teaspoonfuls to nearly nine pounds is somewhere around 0.5 to 1 percent by weight, which seasons the meat but does not cure it.

Notes from the 21st century

Fry a test patty instead. The standard fix, then and now. A teaspoon of the mix cooked through tells you everything tasting it raw would.
No cure means fresh sausage. This is a fresh sausage to be cooked and eaten, not a keeping one. Nothing in the recipe would preserve it.
Trichinosis shaped American cooking. The habit of cooking pork to grey was a response to it, and modern guidance has relaxed to 145°F precisely because the risk fell.

Also in this book

Nectar — The whites of four eggs stirred into cooled syrup, bottled, and kept as a shelf drink.

Don't take our word for it. The complete book is online, free and searchable.

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