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Excellent Lean Sausage

A lean sausage made from beef and pork seasoned with salt, pepper, and coriander.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Excellent Lean Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut beef and pork very finely using a chopper or meat grinder.

  2. For every 100 lbs of meat, add 30 oz of coarse sea salt, 6 oz of black pepper, and a handful of crushed coriander. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pepper + coriandertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,949 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Beef + coriandertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 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

Beef
Provides rich flavor and a firm, meaty bite in the sausage.
Pork
Adds fat, which keeps the sausage moist and tender as it cooks.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins that bind the mixture together.

The step that matters

Mix all ingredients thoroughly. Uneven mixing leaves pockets of salt and pepper, so some bites taste bland and others too strong. Thorough mixing also spreads salt through the meat, helping proteins bind so the sausage holds together.

Swap the coriander

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, 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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