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High Grade Frankfurt Sausage

A smoked sausage made from beef, pork, and hog meats with spices, salt, sugar, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

High Grade Frankfurt Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 120°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the meat

  1. Chill all meats and keep them clean and sweet.

  2. Grind the beef trimmings, hog hearts, hog cheek meat, pork trimmings, and giblet meat together.

Make the mixture

  1. Mix in the salt, onions, mace, white pepper, saltpeter, red pepper, sugar, and flour.

  2. Add water and ice gradually until the mixture reaches the desired consistency.

Stuff, smoke and cook

  1. Stuff the mixture into sheep casings, linking them four to five inches long.

  2. Smoke the sausages for three to four hours, starting at 120°F and finishing at 150°F.

  3. Cook the sausages in water at 170°F for five 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.

  1. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

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

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

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

  5. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 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 trimmings
Provide the main lean meat and fat that give the sausage its body and bite.
Hog cheek meat
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the sausage juicy after cooking.
Flour
Binds the ground meat and helps hold water so the emulsion stays stable.
Saltpeter
Cures the meat, helping it keep its pink colour and resist spoilage.
Sugar
Balances the salt and seasonings and supports browning during smoking.
Sea salt
Draws out proteins for binding and seasons the sausage throughout.

The step that matters

Add water and ice gradually. Keeping the mixture cold while adding water lets the fat and protein emulsify smoothly. If it warms up, the fat can separate and the texture turns greasy and crumbly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, meat, pork, onion, mace, pepper, sugar):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, pork, onion, mace, pepper, 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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