Skip to main content
Main

A Pork Sausage Formula

A pork sausage made from lean beef, pork fat, potato flour, spices, and optional boracic acid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

A Pork Sausage Formula

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the beef and pork fat finely and mix thoroughly.

  2. Add the potato flour and enough water to achieve the right consistency.

  3. Season with salt, white pepper, cayenne, mace, nutmeg, and sage for flavor.

  4. If making in summer, mix in boracic acid to prevent souring.

Stuff

  1. Stuff the mixture into hog casings, ensuring they are not too solid to prevent bursting during cooking.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Rough lean beef
Provides the main lean meat body and bulk of the sausage.
Pork fat
Adds fat for moisture and a juicy texture in the cooked sausage.
Potato flour
Absorbs water and helps bind the mixture to a consistent texture.

The step that matters

Adding water to the right consistency. Water and potato flour set the moisture of the mix. If the mixture is too solid, the casings may burst during cooking, so the consistency must be checked before stuffing.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, potato, flour, mace, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, potato, flour, mace, nutmeg. 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.

More pork sausage recipes

Country 12Smoked 4 See all 47 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipes