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Sausage Cakes, Soyer's

Sausage cakes made with finely chopped pork, bacon, onions, parsley, and pig's caul, then broiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sausage Cakes, Soyer's

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Remove skin and bone from the pork and chop it very fine.

  2. Add the bacon, salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, chopped onions, and parsley to the pork.

  3. Pound the mixture well in a mortar, then mix in the eggs.

Shape and cook

  1. Take pieces of pig's caul and wrap the mixture into egg-sized shapes, slightly flattened.

  2. Broil the wrapped sausage cakes gently over a moderate fire.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  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

Pork
Provides the main meat body and richness of the sausage cakes.
Fat bacon
Adds fat that keeps the cakes moist and juicy as they cook.
Eggs
Bind the mixture so the cakes hold their shape.
Pig's caul
Wraps the mixture, holding it together and keeping it moist during cooking.

The step that matters

Broil gently over a moderate fire. Gentle, moderate heat cooks the cakes through without drying or burning the fat and meat on the outside. Too much heat can scorch the caul before the centre is cooked.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, egg. 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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