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Excellent Sausages

A sausage made from veal, pork, and pork fat seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Excellent Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Chop the veal, pork, and pig fat separately.

  2. Chop the mixture together until finely mixed.

  3. Add the salt, pepper, nutmeg, and mace. Mix well.

  4. Chop the mixture again until evenly seasoned.

  5. Press the mixture into a clean pan.

  6. Store in a cool place.

Form and fry

  1. Form into cakes less than 1 inch thick.

  2. Dust with flour.

  3. Fry in butter for about 10 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Lean veal
Provides the lean meat that forms the body of the sausage.
Lean pork
Adds meat and flavour, with its fat content helping keep the sausage moist.
Pig fat
Adds fat that keeps the chopped mixture moist and tender as it cooks.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins that bind the mixture.
Flour (in the method)
Dusting helps form a light crust that browns when fried.

The step that matters

Chopping the seasoned mixture until evenly seasoned. Salt needs to be distributed evenly through the meat. Uneven seasoning leaves bland or overly salty patches, and over-chopping can make the texture pasty instead of tender.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pork, pepper, nutmeg, butter. 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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