The Profitable Sausage

1902

For the amount of meat used the sausage is the most profitable legacy of the hog. Fully fifty different kinds of this suspected article are manufactured to suit the taste of many peoples; for Italians, with a dominating measure of garlic; for Germans, hard and fatty; for Frenchmen, dry and well larded; for Americans, well spiced; and all of these several grades.

Whatever meat cannot be used otherwise is consigned to the sausage, although for no other reason than that every diminutive piece is available — ham, head and foot trimmings, and the old remnants from the butcher's block. Potato, flour, spices, and water are mixed with the meat, which has been, finely chopped by rocking-knives, and a steam-driven piston forces the mass into the casings, whereupon it becomes sausage. The casings are the intestines of the hog thoroughly scraped and washed by mechanical process.

The pig's snout does not escape — that would be a gross oversight — so it is trimmed off and sold as a pickling "delicacy" to new Americans with unpronounceable names. — The Century.