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Salt-pork Stuffing

A savory turkey stuffing made with salt pork, bread, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Salt-pork Stuffing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the salt pork finely.

  2. In a frying pan, combine the chopped pork and broken bread.

Cook and season

  1. Add the butter and fry over medium heat until browned.

  2. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, and your choice of powdered sweet herb, except sage.

Fill the turkey

  1. Use the stuffing to fill the turkey.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt pork
Renders fat that browns the bread and adds savory richness to the stuffing.
Bread
Provides the bulk and structure of the stuffing, soaking up rendered fat and flavor.
Butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and a rich, toasty flavor.

The step that matters

Fry until browned. Frying over medium heat browns the bread and pork through Maillard reactions, which build flavor. Too little heat steams the mixture instead, leaving it pale and soft.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, bread, butter, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, bread, butter, 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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