Name: Sausage Toast
Ingredients: 6 link sausages; ½ cup grated Parmesan cheese; 1 tablespoon mixed mustard; buttered toast

Why it works: Parmesan cheese and mustard work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 545 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sausage Toast

Ingredients

6 link sausages
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon mixed mustard
buttered toast

Directions

Make the topping

Fry the sausages until cooked through.
Remove the skins from the sausages.
Mix the sausages with the grated Parmesan cheese and mixed mustard.

Assemble

Spread the mixture on hot buttered toast.

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.

Parmesan cheese + mustardtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together545 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sausages: Provide the savoury meat that forms the main topping flavour.
Parmesan cheese: Adds salty, savoury flavour and helps the topping bind and brown slightly.
Mixed mustard: Adds sharp, tangy flavour that cuts through the richness of the sausage and cheese.

“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.