Name: To Make Good Sausage
Ingredients: good quality pork; good quality beef; spices; salt

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 ↓

To Make Good Sausage

Ingredients

good quality pork
good quality beef
spices
salt

Directions

Prepare

Select high-quality pork and beef.
Grind the meats together.

Season and form

Mix in your choice of spices and salt.
Stuff the mixture into casings.

Finish

Cook or store the sausages as desired.

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

Pork: Provides fat and flavour that keep the sausage moist and juicy as it cooks.
Beef: Adds meaty flavour and structure to the ground mixture.

“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.