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Paraffined Sausage

A cured sausage made from ground meat, salt, sugar, nitrate of soda, and ham pickle, then packed and cured.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Paraffined Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Trim the meats.

  2. Chill the meats properly before curing.

  3. Grind the chilled meats through a 1-inch plate.

  4. Weigh 360 lbs. of ground meat.

Mix the cure

  1. Place the ground meat in a mixing machine.

  2. Add the dry cure ingredients.

  3. Mix for about three minutes.

Pack and cure

  1. Pack the mixture into an open tierce.

  2. Add the two gallons of pickle.

  3. Let the meat cure for at least five days and no more than eight days.

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. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Sugar + hamtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Meat + sugartop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Forms the body of the sausage and holds the cure and moisture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat while helping preserve it.
Sugar
Balances the salt and adds mild sweetness to the flavor.
Nitrate of soda (saltpetre)
Helps set the cured pink color and inhibits harmful bacteria during curing.
No. 2 ham pickle
Brine that carries salt and cure into the meat during the curing period.

The step that matters

Let the meat cure for the full period. Salt and nitrate need several days to penetrate the ground meat evenly. Stopping early leaves parts uncured and unsafe, while staying past the limit can make the sausage too salty.

“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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