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Sausages and Apples

Sausage cakes served with sliced apples and remoulade sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sausages and Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cakes

  1. Flatten the sausage meat into round cakes the size of a coin.

  2. Dust the cakes with flour and fry them in a sauté pan with butter.

Fry the apples

  1. Slice the apples to the same size, remove the cores, and fry the slices.

Plate and serve

  1. Arrange the sausage and apple slices alternately around the dish.

  2. Serve with remoulade sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Sausage meat
Forms the savoury base of the cakes, providing the main flavour and body.
Flour
Dusting helps the cakes brown evenly and form a light crust in the pan.
Butter
Fat for frying that adds richness and promotes browning on the cakes and apples.
Large apples
Add natural sweetness and acidity that contrast with the rich sausage.

The step that matters

Frying the cakes after dusting with flour. Flour coats the surface so it browns and crisps in the butter. If the pan is too cool, the cakes absorb fat and turn greasy rather than browning, and if it is too hot the flour can scorch before the sausage cooks through.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, flour, butter, sauce):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, flour, butter, sauce. 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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