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Italian Sausage

A pork sausage seasoned with pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and cured with saltpetre, then smoked and rubbed with olive oil and vine ash.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Italian Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Remove the fat and rind from the pork and scrape the lean meat into a paste.

  2. Add the bacon fat and season with pepper, cloves, mace, and nutmeg.

Stuff and cure

  1. Stuff the mixture into the pork casings.

  2. Cure the sausages in pounded saltpetre for eight days.

Smoke and finish

  1. Smoke the sausages until sufficiently dry.

  2. Rub the sausages with olive oil and ashes from burnt vine branches.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg and shoulder of young pork
Provides the lean meat that forms the body of the sausage.
Bacon fat
Adds fat for moisture and a rich, juicy texture in the finished sausage.
Pounded saltpetre
Cures the meat, helping preserve it and give it a characteristic color.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, aromatic heat that seasons the meat.
Ground cloves
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor.
Ground mace
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor with a citrusy note.
Ground nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor.

The step that matters

Cure the sausages in pounded saltpetre for eight days. Saltpetre must be evenly distributed and given the full curing time so the meat is preserved and safely cured before smoking; shortening or uneven curing risks spoilage.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, clove, nutmeg, olive):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, clove, nutmeg, olive. 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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