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Sausage

A sausage roasted with water, butter, and spices, finished with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Roast the sausage

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Roast the sausage with 1 cup of water in the dripping pan.

  3. Baste every 15 to 20 minutes with butter and water.

  4. Twenty minutes before serving, remove the pan and paper, dredge with flour, and baste with butter until light brown.

Make the gravy

  1. Pour in 1 pint of water to make a thickened gravy, adding cloves, nutmeg, cayenne, and mace.

  2. Strain the gravy before serving, and add currant jelly if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve on very hot dishes.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Dredging the sausage lightly thickens the browned coating and helps it brown further.
Butter
Basting with butter adds fat that promotes browning and a rich, golden surface.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a touch of acidity to balance the spiced gravy.

The step that matters

Dredge with flour and baste until light brown. Flour dusted onto a fatty, hot surface browns and thickens quickly, so timing matters. Too little basting leaves the coating pale, while too much can scorch the butter and make the gravy bitter.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace. 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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