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Spadbury’s Oxford Sausages

A sausage made from pork, veal, and beef suet, seasoned with bread, sage, pepper, and salt, then smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef 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 ↓

Spadbury’s Oxford Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the pork and veal, removing skin and sinews.

  2. Mix the meats with the beef suet.

  3. Add the soaked bread, sage, pepper, and salt; mix well.

Stuff and dry

  1. Stuff the mixture into an ox-gut, tying the ends securely.

  2. Hang the sausages to smoke, wrapped in muslin, until high-dried.

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 + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pork + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Veal + beeftop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the main lean meat, giving the sausage its body and bite.
Veal
Adds a mild, delicate meat flavour and a fine, tender texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the sausage moist and carries flavour as it dries.
Crumb of a penny loaf
Soaked bread absorbs liquid and helps the filling hold together with a tender texture.

The step that matters

Hang the sausages to smoke until high-dried. Drying too little leaves the sausages soft and prone to spoiling, while drying too long makes them hard and dry. Judge by feel rather than time, since drying depends on air and smoke.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Sagethe original
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, veal, beef, 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.

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