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Summer Sausage Recipes

A cured sausage made from lean beef, pork, and hog back fat seasoned with salt, saltpeter, pepper, coriander, and mustard.

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

Summer Sausage Recipes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Chop the lean beef, pork, and hog back fat finely.

  2. Mix in the fine salt, refined saltpeter, ground white pepper, whole coriander seed, and whole mustard seed.

Form and stuff

  1. Knead the mixture well and form it into loaves.

  2. Stuff the mixture tightly into soaked and washed No. 1 hog bung guts.

Cure, smoke and store

  1. Hang the sausages until they show a bright red color.

  2. Administer a slow cold smoke to the sausages.

  3. Store the sausages in a cool place, away from freezing.

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. Coriander + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together967 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pork + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,445 recipes

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

  4. Beef + coriandertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Beef + mustardtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 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

Lean beef
Provides the main lean meat structure that binds into a firm sausage.
Pork
Adds meat structure and savory flavor to the sausage body.
Hog back fat
Supplies fat that keeps the sausage moist and tender as it dries.
Refined saltpeter
Helps develop the bright red cured color in the sausage.

The step that matters

Hang until bright red. Color develops only as the cure works through the meat, so the sausages should be held until the red color shows before smoking. Stopping early leaves the sausage grey-brown rather than rosy.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, coriander, mustard. 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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