[Sca-cooks] Has anyone held a salt tasting?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Mar 11, 2009, at 12:35 PM, Audrey Bergeron-Morin wrote:

>> Just one: Do not, do not, do not, use Indian black salt in pork  
>> sausages. It
>> is very bad and will exact a terrible vengeance upon you.
>
> Now you *have* to tell the story...

Dead men tell no tales.

Seriously, though, my experience was that, either due to the salt  
itself, and any impurities that may add to its character, or perhaps  
to chemicals in the meat itself (which was pork), when reacting with  
the salt, created a pretty powerful hydrogen sulfide whiff. The  
sausages, which were otherwise unremarkable and made with great care,  
frankly stank. I hoped that the fumes would dissipate in cooking. They  
didn't.

My feeling was that the whole point of making sausages was to put  
things into intestines, with a view toward the final product going in  
the general direction of the consumer's intestines.

A constant and powerful reminder of (more or less) what comes *out of*  
intestines would seem to me to be the antithesis of the sausage- 
maker's art.

I won't be able to look at an Elizabethan recipe for Fartes of  
Portingale in the same way again.

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter