The Oakes Ames Sausage

I promise I won't keep quoting from someone else's unpublished manuscript, but the diary of Evelina Gilmore Ames is incredibly fascinating. Mrs. Ames did not like to cook. She enjoyed baking which usually occupied one day a week. Mince meat pie was a weekly staple apparently because it cleaned up the leftovers from the previous week. I've read through a year and a half of her two year diary and only struck upon one recipe. In the lost diary of Anna C. Ames, Evelina's future daughter-in-law, there were many wonderful and useful recipes along with ideas for table settings, lists of guests, and ideas for home remedies. Two very different women, and remember that Anna, the epitome of the late Victorian domestic manager, became the fighter for women's right to vote.

Here's Evelina's sausage recipe 38 pounds of pork, 4 1/2 ounces of sage and savory, 3 1/2 ounces pepper. Unmentioned but implied is the need for natural sausage casings. We don't know if the 4 1/2 ounces was the total for sage and savory, but it seems like it would be 4 1/2 ounces of each. Given the time the sausage was made, I'm almost positive that these would be dry spices rather than fresh. The savory was almost positively summer savory. Winter savory was grown in New England gardens and had a stronger taste than the summer variety, but it wasn't as popular as a dried seasoning.

There's an old Maine joke about a city boy who arrives on a farm and sees a pig limping around with a wooden leg. When he inquires of the farmer what's going on the farmer replies "we had a fire in the kitchen and that pig rushed into the house and woke us all up and saved our lives." "Is that how he lost his leg?" "No, there was another time when my son fell down a well, and that pig ran back and forth until I got the idea something was up and went and rescued my son." "So that's how he lost his leg?      "Oh no, my wife says that damned pig is just too good to eat all at once!"

Seems to me one hind quarter would be about 38 pounds of finished meat, but what can we do with this recipe if we don't have that much meat lying around? Okay 4.5 ounces dry spices converts to 10 tablespoons and a little more than two teaspoons and 3.5 ounces converts to 8 tablespoons and 1 teaspoons. If you have a pound of ground pork add 1 level teaspoon of ground sage and 1 level teaspoon of ground savory. The pepper comes out to be 3/4 of an already scant teaspoon of the other spices so I go with a recipe of 1 level teaspoon of each (make the pepper somewhat coarsely ground)for a pound of sausage. Mix thoroughly into the ground pork and make sausage patties. Wait until tomorrow for my taste test of this recipe!