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Aunt Hannah's Sausage Meat

A cured pork sausage made with salt, sage, and pepper, packed in jars and fried before serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Aunt Hannah's Sausage Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Mix pepper, sage, and salt together.

  2. Work the mixture thoroughly through the meat.

  3. Pack the meat in stone jars and keep in a cold place, but do not allow it to freeze.

Fry and serve

  1. To fry sausages, prick them well to prevent the skin from bursting.

  2. Lay sausages in a frying pan and heat slowly until sufficient fat has come from them to prevent burning, turning occasionally.

  3. For gravy, pour nearly all the fat from the pan after laying the sausages on a platter.

  4. Add a little boiling water to the pan and stir well until browned with the sediment.

  5. Pour the gravy over the sausages and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the meat and fat that form the body and juiciness of the sausage.
Sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins so the mixture binds together.
Sage
Adds the characteristic herbal aroma to the sausage meat.
Pepper
Adds sharp aromatic heat that seasons the sausage meat.

The step that matters

Pricking the sausages before frying. Pricking lets steam and fat escape so the skin does not burst. Heating slowly lets enough fat render out to keep the sausages from scorching in the pan.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper):

  1. Sagethe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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