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To Make Bologna Sausages

A sausage made from beef, veal, bacon, and herbs, stuffed into a gut and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make Bologna Sausages

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the beef suet, fat bacon, lean bacon, beef, and veal into small pieces and chop finely.

  2. Mince the sage leaves and sweet herbs, then mix with the chopped meat.

  3. Season the mixture with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Fill and cook

  1. Fill a large gut with the meat mixture, pricking the gut to prevent bursting.

  2. Place the filled gut in a saucepan of boiling water and boil gently for 1 hour.

  3. Lay the sausages on clean straw to dry.

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

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

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

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

  3. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

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

  4. Veal + sagetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together670 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Beef + sagetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together847 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the sausage moist and tender during cooking.
Fat bacon
Contributes fat and flavour, keeping the filling juicy as it cooks.
Lean bacon
Adds savoury, meaty flavour and body to the filling.
Beef
Provides the main meat structure and savoury flavour of the sausage.
Veal
Adds a mild, tender meat texture to the filling.
Sage leaves
Contributes a warm, aromatic herbal flavour to the meat.

The step that matters

Pricking the gut before boiling. Steam forms inside the casing as the filling heats. Pricking lets it escape so the gut does not burst, which would release the filling into the water.

Swap the sage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, 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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