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English Sausages

A pork and blood sausage seasoned with salt, pepper, saltpetre, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar, boiled, smoked, and hung to dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

English Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Chop the pork very small.

  2. Mix in the pig's blood, fine salt, ground pepper, saltpetre, cloves, powdered cinnamon, and crushed sugar thoroughly.

Form and boil

  1. Form the mixture into sausages.

  2. Boil the sausages in a pot of water with a handful of salt for 20 minutes.

Smoke and dry

  1. Remove the sausages, allow them to drip, and then smoke for three days.

  2. Hang the sausages in a current of dry air.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pork + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh pork
Provides the bulk of the sausage and its fat, which keeps the filling moist and tender.
Pig's blood
Binds the mixture and adds richness and color to the sausage filling.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured sausage its characteristic reddish color.

The step that matters

Boiling the sausages. Boiling should cook the sausages through gently without bursting their casings. Water that is too hot can split the casing and let fat and filling escape, so keep the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, clove, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Allspicefits about as well
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, clove, sugar. 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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