SC - TI article?

[James F. Johnson]

Hello folks,

Jasmine and I are working on Lucanian sausages today. Lots of fun. But we 
have some questions. We followed the period recipes which is 10% salt by 
weight. The trial patties we fried were, well, unpalatable. We added half 
again as much meat and even boiled up a trial sausage (presmoked) but still 
the sausage is too salty. We are going to add another 6lbs of ground pork, 
bringing the total up to over 20 lbs meat to 1 lb salt (including curing salt 
with nitrites) and 3 oz fennel seed and 3 oz cracked bl. pepper. 

We recognize that we have diverted from the original recipe, but man, if you 
ate what we ate, you'd agree that the sausage would be unacceptable at a 
feast. We did postulate that salted, smoked foods such as fish and hams etc  
would have been boiled sometimes numerously to remove salt and reconstitute 
the product. As such we intend on boiling the sausage the day of the feast to 
1) warm it 2) remove excess salt.

Our question is, has anyone been working with the Lucanian sausage recipe 
recently, what were your experiences regarding the salt concentration, what 
did you do about it etc. We did check the Florithingy and the only messages 
we could find mentioned the experiment and that it was excessively salty, but 
did not go into detail as to whether or not they dealt with the issue and the 
results. The web address mentioned
http://www.geocities.com/athens/academy/9523/cooking.html 
is not functioning,so we were unable to follow up on the poster's experience. 
 

Any input folks? 

Hauviette