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Straight Pork Sausage

A sausage made from fresh pork trimmings seasoned with salt, pepper, saltpeter, and sage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and sage are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,527 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Straight Pork Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Grind and mix

  1. Grind the pork trimmings using a 5/32 inch hash plate.

  2. Mix the ground pork with fine salt, white pepper, saltpeter, and sage until well combined.

  3. Adjust the mixture to the desired consistency using a mixer.

Stuff and chill

  1. Stuff the mixture into hog casings and form into 3-inch links.

  2. Wash the sausages in cold water and hang them in a cooler to chill and dry.

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

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

  2. White pepper + sagetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pork + white peppertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together791 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl butyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork trimmings
Provide the meat and fat that give the sausage its body and juiciness.
Saltpeter
Helps preserve the pink cured color and slows bacterial growth in the sausage.
Sage
Adds the characteristic savory, herbal aroma of the sausage.
White pepper
Adds a mild, sharp heat and aroma to the seasoning blend.

The step that matters

Adjust the mixture to the desired consistency. Salt draws out sticky muscle proteins that bind the ground meat, so the mix turns tacky and holds together. Mixing too little leaves it crumbly, while overmixing warms the fat and can make the texture smeary and greasy.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, sage. 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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