Skip to main content
Main

To Cook Sausage

Sausage cooked in a pan and served with a milk‑flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Cook Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sausage

  1. Prick the sausage skins with a sharp fork to prevent bursting.

  2. If cooking in bulk, shape the sausage into balls with your hands.

Fry the sausage

  1. Place the sausage in a hot frying pan and fry until brown, adding no fat.

  2. Remove the sausage to a platter when done.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of dry flour to the fat in the pan and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

  2. Gradually add 1 cup of milk while stirring.

  3. When the gravy is boiling and creamy, add salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Pour the gravy over the sausage and serve.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Sausage
Provides the main meat and savory flavor, browning in the pan to build the drippings for the gravy.
Dry flour
Thickens the gravy by absorbing the fat and milk as it cooks and swells with heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, which thickens into a creamy sauce when heated with the flour.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the flour. Adding the milk gradually while stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the gravy thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes