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Sausages

Pork sausages made with pork, pepper, salt, sage, bread crumbs, and sausage skins, boiled for one hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage 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 ↓

Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sausage

  1. Chop the pork as fine as possible.

  2. Season the pork with pepper, salt, and sage.

  3. Mix in the bread crumbs thoroughly.

Fill and cook

  1. Fill the cleaned sausage skins with the mixture, tying the ends securely.

  2. Prick the sausages with a pin and boil them gently in a kettle of boiling water for 1 hour.

  3. Remove the sausages.

  4. Lay them on clean straw to cool.

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

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

  2. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Sage + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the meat and fat that make up the body and juiciness of the sausage.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and fat, helping the filling hold together and stay tender.
Sage
Adds the herbal aroma that defines this sausage's flavour.
Salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins that bind the filling.

The step that matters

Boiling the sausages gently. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil cooks the filling evenly and prevents the skins from splitting. Pricking the skins lets steam escape, reducing the risk of bursting.

Swap the sage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, bread. 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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