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Preserve

To Make Sausages

A pork sausage made by finely chopping pork and leaf fat, seasoning with pepper, salt, and sage, forming into cakes, frying, and optionally stuffing into casings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

To Make Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the fresh pork and leaf fat exceedingly fine.

  2. Combine the pork and fat in a bowl.

  3. Season the mixture with pepper, coarse sea salt, and dried sage.

Shape and cook

  1. Form the mixture into small cakes.

  2. Fry the cakes until cooked through.

  3. For better preservation, stuff the mixture into sausage casings.

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

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

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 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

Fresh pork
Provides the main meat body and structure of the sausage.
Leaf fat
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the cooked sausage from drying out.
Dried sage
Adds a warm, aromatic herbal flavour to the pork.

The step that matters

Chop the pork and fat exceedingly fine. Fine, even chopping distributes the fat through the lean meat so the sausage stays juicy and holds together when formed and fried. Coarse pieces can make the cakes crumble or cook unevenly.

Swap the sage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, 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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