author
George Jacob Sayer
b. 1864
Best remembered for a hands-on 1913 guide to meat curing and sausage making, this early 20th-century practical writer turned trade knowledge into a compact manual that stayed useful long after publication. His work offers a vivid glimpse of how butchers and packers learned the craft in an era of printed shop guides.
1 Audiobook
Butchers', Packers' and Sausage Makers' Red Book
by George Jacob Sayer
About the author
Born in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on April 23, 1864, George Jacob Sayer was an American writer whose known surviving work is closely tied to the meat trade. Records located for him indicate that he died in Chicago on April 18, 1926, and was buried in McHenry, Illinois.
Sayer is credited by the Library of Congress with Butchers', packers' and sausage makers' red book, published in 1913 by Wolf, Sayer & Heller. The book is a compact practical manual on curing, smoking, and sausage making, aimed at working butchers and packers rather than a literary audience.
Very little biographical detail appears to be widely documented online, so his reputation today rests mainly on that trade handbook. Even so, the book has endured in library catalogs and digitized editions, giving modern readers a useful snapshot of everyday food production knowledge from the early 1900s.