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To Season Sausage

A seasoning blend for sausage made with meat, salt, pepper, red pepper, and sage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Season Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, combine 40 lbs. of meat with 1 lb. of coarse sea salt.

  2. Add black pepper and 12 oz. of red pepper to the mixture.

  3. Incorporate sage to taste for common sausage intended for frying. For sausage designed for boiling, reduce the amount of sage.

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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Meat + sagetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Forms the bulk of the sausage and provides the main texture and richness.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out and bind its proteins for a firmer texture.
Red pepper
Adds heat and aroma to the seasoning blend.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper. 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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