Skip to main content
Main

Sausage, Italian

A pork sausage made with lean and fat pork, spices, pig's blood, white wine, and calf head strips, boiled then smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Coriander and anise share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 86 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Sausage, Italian

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the minced lean and fat pork.

  2. Season the mixture with salt, mixed spice, coriander seed, and bruised anise seed.

  3. Moisten the mixture with pig's blood and white wine until it binds, but do not make it too wet.

  4. Mix in the narrow strips from the calf's head.

Stuff and cook

  1. Stuff the mixture into sausage skins and tie the ends securely.

  2. Plunge the sausages into boiling water and boil gently for 30 minutes.

Dry

  1. After boiling, dry the sausages in a smokehouse or over a wood fire until hard.

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. Coriander + anisetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together86 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pork + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,544 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Coriander + white winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Pork + anisetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Pork + coriandertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together909 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean pork
Provides the lean meat that forms the body of the sausage.
Fat pork
Adds fat for moisture and a softer, juicier bite in the sausage.
Pig's blood
Helps bind the mixture and adds moisture and richness to the filling.
White wine
Adds moisture to the filling and helps it bind without making it too wet.

The step that matters

Moistening the mixture. Too much liquid makes the filling loose and hard to bind, while too little leaves it crumbly. Add the blood and wine gradually until the mixture just holds together.

Swap the anise

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, coriander, white wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Anisethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, coriander, white wine. 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.

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes