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Sauce

To Make Sausage Meat

Sausage meat made from pork with salt, pepper, optional sage, stored in lard-covered stone crocks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 Make Sausage Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the tender pieces of pork, using one third fat and two thirds lean.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. For immediate use, add finely pulverized sage to improve flavor.

Store

  1. If not used right away, store in stone crocks covered with lard to exclude air.

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. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 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

Pork fat
Adds juiciness and richness, and carries much of the flavor in the mixture.
Lean pork
Provides the meaty body and structure that the sausage meat holds together around.
Sage
Adds aromatic, savory flavor to the meat when used right away.

The step that matters

Covering the stored meat with lard. Lard covering excludes air from the meat, which slows oxidation and spoilage. Meat left exposed to air will degrade faster, so the layer must fully cover the surface.

Swap the sage

The recipe marks sage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper):

  1. Sagethe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, 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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