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Sausage in Oil

A preserved sausage made from cured beef and pork hearts, spices, corn flour, and oil, canned and steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Sausage in Oil

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 140°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cure and season

  1. Cure the beef hearts for 20 to 30 days.

  2. Grind the cured meat and mix with spices and water.

  3. Add the ground black pepper, red pepper, allspice, coriander seed, saltpeter, and corn flour to the mixture.

  4. Spread the mixture on boards in a cooler for 24 to 36 hours at 35 to 40°F (1 to 4°C).

Smoke and cook

  1. Stuff the mixture into beef rounds and smoke with hickory wood and sawdust for 21⁄2 hours at 120 to 140°F (49 to 60°C).

  2. Cook the sausage in water at 135°F (57°C) for two hours.

  3. Cool the sausage and hang it in the cooler for 12 hours.

Can and seal

  1. Pack the sausage into cans, adding oil: 35 pounds sausage and 15 pounds oil for 50-pound cans, or 14 pounds sausage and 6 pounds oil for 25-pound cans.

  2. Solder the can tops and steam at 190°F (88°C) for one hour.

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. Allspice + coriandertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + coriandertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,949 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Coriander + corntop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef hearts
Provide the main meat, whose cured protein gives the sausage its firm, sliceable body.
Pork cheeks
Add fat and tenderness, keeping the meat moist through curing and cooking.
Pork hearts
Contribute lean meat that binds with the other meats into a cohesive mass.
Saltpeter
Cures the meat, helping it hold a pink color and develop its cured flavor.
Corn flour
Absorbs moisture and helps bind the ground meat into a firm, cohesive texture.

The step that matters

Cooling and curing before canning. Curing time and cold holding let the salt and saltpeter work through the meat and firm it. Skipping or shortening these steps can leave the texture soft and the cure uneven.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, pepper, allspice, corn, flour, cottonseed):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, pepper, allspice, corn, flour, cottonseed. 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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