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Pork, German Fashion

A pork roast flavored with powdered sage, baked and served with a pickle, sugar, flour, butter, and red wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and sage are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,527 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pork, German Fashion

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Remove the pork from the pickle.

  2. Rub the pork with powdered sage.

  3. Cover the skin with greased kitchen paper.

Roast and baste

  1. Roast or bake the pork as usual.

  2. Baste the pork with the pickle it was soaked in.

  3. Cook for 20 minutes per pound of meat.

Make the pickle sauce

  1. Heat a cup of the pickle in a saucepan.

  2. Add a good-sized lump of sugar.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter.

  4. Stir in a few drops of sugar browning.

  5. Stir in a glass of red wine.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Pork
Is the main meat, whose slow cooking turns it tender and juicy.
Pickle
Soaks into the meat and, reduced, gives the sauce its sharp, tangy flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the meat instead of running off.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth finish to the thickened sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the pickle and aids browning.
Red wine
Adds depth and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked into the butter and hot liquid long enough to swell its starch; otherwise the sauce stays chalky or lumpy and thin.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, sugar, flour, butter, red wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, sugar, flour, butter, red wine. 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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