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Improved Sausage

A pork sausage seasoned with salt, pepper, sage, sugar, ginger, cloves, celery salt, then ground and packed in muslin bags.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Improved Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all ingredients well together.

  2. Sprinkle the mixture over the meat before grinding to save labor.

Pack and seal

  1. Stuff the mixture into bags made of old muslin (10 by 18 inches).

  2. After the sausage is cold and solid, coat it well with melted paraffin wax to exclude air.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  3. Sage + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together731 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh pork
Supplies the meat and fat that give the sausage its body and juiciness.
Powdered sage
Adds the dominant savory, herbal aroma that defines the sausage's flavor.

The step that matters

Coat the sausage only after it is cold and solid. Warm or soft sausage can melt or mix with the wax, so the coating may not seal the surface evenly and air can still reach the meat.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, ham, pepper, sage, sugar, ginger, clove):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, ham, pepper, sage, sugar, ginger, clove. 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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