Dad's Recipe for Homemade Sausage

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, and we showed up at church just as the sun was coming up over the horizon. It was cold. My jacket wasn't enough to really keep me warm, but it had to do. I made myself comfortable by covering my hands with my jacket sleeves, while I enjoyed the service. After sunrise service was over, we went into the fellowship hall to have breakfast.

The men had been up since 3 a. m. cooking breakfast for the crowd. What a wonderful breakfast feast it was! There was bacon, ham, and home made sausage. The sausage was out of this world! When I asked about the sausage, I learned that it was made by one of the men of the church. The man is a farmer and he raises hogs, and he donates meat and sausage from several hogs every spring to raise money for the church and to help feed some of the less fortunate people.

On the table was two huge bowls full of scrambled eggs, and a big crock pot full of homemade grits. There was a platter of cheese and fruit, and platter after platter of homemade biscuits. After breakfast was over, I was helping to clean up, and the cooks told my pastor and me to get all that we wanted and take it home. I made two to-go plates loaded up with bacon, ham and sausage. I wrapped up more than a dozen biscuits to go also. Oh! That was the best breakfast I had ever had in my entire life!

This Easter breakfast reminded me of the homemade sausage that my dad used to make. We didn't have hogs, but my uncle did, and my dad helped my uncle make sausage for our families and to have for sale. I don't think the sausage tasted just the same as what my dad and uncle made, but the sausage I ate yesterday put me in mind of it.

I'm going to give a really cut down version of how my dad and uncle made breakfast sausage. You need to have a meat grinder to make good sausage. Dad made sausage rather hot, because that is the way we liked it, and so did the customers that bought it.

Here is what you need to make homemade sausage:

6 pounds pork shoulder
1 pound of fat back
5 teaspoons of kosher salt
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of nutmeg
2 cloves of chopped garlic
2 tablespoons of red pepper
1 and 1/2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons of sage
2 teaspoons of thyme
2 and 1/2 teaspoons of black pepper
1/2 cup of sherry vinegar

Here is what you do:

Cut up the pork and fat back into small pieces and feed it into a meat grinder. After you have ground the meat add all of the other ingredients and and mix it together until the meat and spices are totally infused into the meat. You will then split up the sausage into approximately 1 pound packages; but before you do you will want to make sure your sausage tastes the way you want it to. Sample some of your sausage by frying it up in a skillet. The sausage should have a good balance of heat, tang and spice.

Enjoy!