Skip to main content
Main

Scotch or Beef Sausage

A sausage made from lean beef, beef suet, and seasonings, cooked in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 331 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Scotch or Beef Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the lean beef and beef suet finely.

  2. Mix in 21% of the weight in coarse sea salt, 4% white pepper, 4% allspice, and 3 ounces of rubbed sage.

  3. If desired, add a little pork for better flavor.

Stuff and cook

  1. Stuff the mixture into wide hog casings or beef rounds.

  2. Cook the sausages in boiling water for about 30 minutes.

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. Allspice + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together331 recipes

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

  2. White pepper + allspicetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together272 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. White pepper + sagetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beef + allspicetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,940 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Beef + sagetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together847 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main meaty body and structure of the sausage.
Beef suet
Adds fat for moisture and a juicy, tender texture after cooking.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins that bind the mixture.
Sage
Adds the characteristic aromatic, savory flavor of Scotch sausage.

The step that matters

Cook the sausages in boiling water for about 30 minutes. Holding the sausages at a gentle boil cooks the meat through evenly. Boiling too hard can split casings and leave the texture coarse, so keep the water at a steady simmer-level boil.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, allspice, sage):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, allspice, sage. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes