Skip to main content
Main

Blood Sausage

A sausage made from cured fat, blood, spices, and onions, cooked and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Marjoram and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,075 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Blood Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fat and skins

  1. Cook the cured fat for about 1 hour and the skins for 2 hours at 200°F (93°C).

  2. Grind the cooked fat and skins using a small or medium plate.

Mix and stuff

  1. Add salt, white pepper, sweet marjoram, onions, cloves, and blood to the ground mixture and mix thoroughly.

  2. Stuff the mixture into large beef casings.

Cook and cool

  1. Boil the sausages in the same water used to cook the meat until they float.

  2. Dip the sausages in cold water and hang them to cool.

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. Marjoram + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Marjoram + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. White pepper + marjoramtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together134 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. White pepper + clovetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together752 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Blood
Provides the body, color and characteristic flavor of the sausage filling.
Cured fat skins
Add gelatin-rich body that helps the filling bind and hold together after cooking.
Cured back fat or shoulder fat
Adds richness and moisture, keeping the sausage from drying out as it cooks.
Onions
Contribute moisture and mild sweetness that balances the rich blood and fat.

The step that matters

Cooking the fat and skins at 200°F. Cooking at a low, steady temperature softens the fat and skins without melting them away or toughening them, so the ground mixture stays moist and binds well once blood is added.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (marjoram, onion, clove):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against marjoram, onion, clove. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes