Can You Help Me Find A Sausage Recipe?

"I'm looking for a recipe for homemade sausage."  To the staff of the Newton Falls Public Library this seemed to be a simple request.  The library owns a copy of  "The Sausage-making Cookbook"  by Jerry Predika.  However, our patron already had their own copy of this title and it did not include a recipe quite to their liking.  At this time, she did not wish to get a recipe off the Internet; she preferred something from a book.

In our extensive collection of cookbooks, we found several books that we thought might have what she wanted including "The Complete Meat Cookbook: A Juicy and Authoritative Guide to Selecting, Seasoning, and Cooking Today's Beef, Pork, Lamb, and Veal" by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly, "The Way to Cook" by Julia Child, and "Lidia's Italian Table" by Lidia Bastianich.  These all contained recipes either too heavily spiced or with ingredients our patron did not wish to use.

Continuing our discussion, our patron explained that they were looking to make a lightly seasoned old-fashioned country sausage. The recipe in Mary Emma Showalter's "Mennonite Community Cookbook: Favorite Family Recipes" still wasn't exactly the recipe she wanted.  

Thinking a bit out of the box, we decided to take a look at our collection of Foxfire books. The first Foxfire book was published in 1972.  "The 'Foxfire Book' and its eleven companion volumes stand memorial to the people and the vanishing culture of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, brought to life for readers through the words of those who were born, lived their lives, and passed away there" [www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx].  The full title of the first book is "The Foxfire Book: HogDressing; Log Cabin Building; Mountain Crafts and Foods; Planting by the Signs;Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing; Moonshining; and Other Affairs of Plain Living." The chapter on Hog Dressing included Slaughtering Hogs, Curing and Smoking Hog, and Recipes for Hog.  She said this sausage recipe might have the right combination of spices.

In the event the recipe did not taste as she imagined, our patron also placed holds on some of the other sausage making books in our shared CLEVNET catalog.