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To Make Good Summer Sausage

A sausage made from beef, lean pork, fat pork or bacon, seasoned with salt, pepper, and optional spices, then smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

To Make Good Summer Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Chop the beef finely, ensuring no water is added and the juice is saved.

  2. Add the lean pork and chop again until well mixed.

  3. Dice the fat pork and add it to the mixture.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, whole peppercorns, and ground spices, ensuring total seasoning does not exceed 2 pounds for every 100 pounds of meat.

Stuff and cure

  1. Stuff the mixture into hog casings or beef bungs tightly.

  2. Hang the sausages in a cool place for 4 to 5 days.

Smoke and finish

  1. Smoke the sausages slowly at moderate heat.

  2. To remove any white appearance, rub the casings with a cloth saturated with fat.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 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

Beef
Provides the main lean meat structure and binds the sausage when chopped finely.
Lean pork
Adds lean meat for structure and a balanced, mild flavour.
Fat pork or bacon
Supplies fat that keeps the sausage moist and tender during drying and smoking.

The step that matters

Chopping the meat finely with no added water. Fine chopping spreads the fat and protein evenly so the sausage binds firmly and dries without becoming crumbly. Adding water dilutes the seasoning and can encourage spoilage during the long hanging period, so the juice is kept instead.

“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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