Name: Strasburg Sausages
Ingredients: 5 pounds lean pork; 5 pounds beef; 1 pint water; seasonings to taste

Why it works: Pork and beef 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 ↓

Strasburg Sausages

Ingredients

5 pounds lean pork
5 pounds beef
1 pint water
seasonings to taste

Directions

Prepare

Chop the pork separately and mix with the chopped beef.
Add seasonings and 1 pint of water to the meat mixture.

Stuff and smoke

Stuff the mixture into sausage casings and smoke them.

Cook and serve

Cook the sausages for 20 minutes before serving.

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.

Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,690 recipes

Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean pork: Provides fat and flavor that keep the sausage moist and tender during cooking.
Beef: Adds meaty flavor and firm texture to the sausage mixture.
Water: Adds moisture to the meat mixture, helping keep the sausages juicy.

“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.