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Spanish Sausage

A cured sausage made from pig meat, spices, wine, and beef tongues, boiled and smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Spanish Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the pig's meat until it forms a uniform mass, adding coarse sea salt while chopping.

  2. Mix mace, black pepper, lemon peel, laurel leaves, Spanish wine, and beef tongues into the chopped meat.

Wrap and cook

  1. Fill the mixture into the pig's skin.

  2. Wrap the skin in strong muslin.

  3. Boil in a mixture of water, vinegar, and wine for one hour.

  4. Finish with a mild cold smoke.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + laureltop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + laureltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,239 recipes

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

  5. Mace + laureltop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,164 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Hind and forequarters of pig
Supplies the meat and fat that form the body of the sausage.
Beef tongues
Adds meaty body and richness to the filling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and helps bind the chopped meat together.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic oils that lift the rich meat flavour.

The step that matters

Chopping the meat to a uniform mass. Chopping with the salt until the meat is evenly textured lets proteins extract and bind, so the filling holds together and slices cleanly once cooked.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lemon, laurel, wine, beef, vinegar):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lemon, laurel, wine, beef, vinegar. 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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