Skip to main content
Main

Savoury Sausages for Eating Cold

A cold sausage made from lean beef and streaky pork, seasoned with sugar, salt, spices, cayenne, shallot or garlic, and smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the meat

  1. Mix equal parts of sugar, coarse sea salt, and spices.

  2. Salt the beef and pork with this mixture for 5-6 days.

  3. Remove from the pickle and chop finely, discarding skin and gristle.

  4. If pork fat is less than one-third, add enough beef suet to make it up.

Season and stuff

  1. Season the mixture with cayenne pepper and shallot or garlic.

  2. Stuff the mixture into cleaned ox gut, tying in lengths of 9-10 inches.

Dry, cook and serve

  1. Dry the sausages in wood smoke.

  2. Bake or boil the sausages, then let them cool and cut into pieces 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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Beef + shallottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pork + shallottop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 meaty body and bulk of the sausage.
Streaky pork
Adds fat that keeps the sausage moist and flavourful after cooking.
Sugar
Balances the salt and helps the meat take on a mellow sweetness during curing.
Coarse sea salt
Cures the meat, drawing out moisture and firming its texture.

The step that matters

Salting the beef and pork for 5-6 days. Salt and sugar must penetrate the meat evenly during the pickle. Too short a cure leaves the centre under-seasoned and less firm, while the salt draws out moisture and firms the protein so the sausage holds together when sliced.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Shallotthe original

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

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes