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Savoury Sausages for Eating Cold

A smoked sausage made from lean beef and pork, seasoned with salt, sugar, pepper, allspice, and smoked, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Savoury Sausages for Eating Cold

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the meat

  1. Salt the beef and pork with common salt, coarse sugar, saltpetre, black pepper, and allspice for 5-6 days.

  2. Chop the salted meat finely, ensuring it is free from skin and gristle.

  3. If the pork fat is less than half the weight of the lean meat, add beef suet.

  4. Season the mixture with additional pepper and eschalot or garlic.

Stuff and smoke

  1. Stuff the mixture into cleaned ox-gut and tie it into lengths of 8-9 inches.

  2. Smoke the sausages like hams or red herrings.

Serve

  1. To serve, boil or bake the sausages, then slice them cold for sandwiches.

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 + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Allspice + garlictop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main lean meat that gives the sausage its firm, sliceable body.
Pork fat and lean pork
Fat carries flavour and keeps the cold sausage moist and tender as it cools.
Common salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat, helping it firm and preserve during curing.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured sausage its pink colour.
Coarse sugar
Balances the salt and rounds out the flavour of the cured meat.

The step that matters

Salting the meat for 5-6 days. Salt and curing agents need the full time to penetrate the meat evenly. Stopping early leaves uncured centres that can spoil, so the meat must rest the whole period.

Swap the garlic

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

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, sugar, pepper, allspice. 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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