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Excellent Sausages

A sausage made from veal, pork, and pig fat seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Excellent Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Chop the veal, lean pork, and inside fat separately.

  2. Mix the chopped meats together until finely mixed.

  3. Add the salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, and pounded mace, then mix well.

  4. Chop the mixture again until evenly seasoned.

  5. Press the mixture into a clean pan.

  6. Store in a cool place.

Cook and serve

  1. When ready to serve, form into cakes less than 1 inch thick.

  2. Dust the cakes with flour.

  3. Fry in butter for about 10 minutes, or roast in a Dutch or American oven.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides lean meat that forms the bulk and body of the sausage.
Inside fat of pig
Adds fat that keeps the sausage moist and juicy during cooking.
Lean pork
Contributes lean meat for structure and a savoury meaty flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins so the mixture binds together.
Flour
Dusted on the cakes to help form a light crust that browns when fried.

The step that matters

Chop the mixture again until evenly seasoned. Salt is needed to extract meat proteins that bind the mixture; uneven mixing leaves pockets of salt and weak binding, so the cakes may crumble or taste patchy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pork, pepper, nutmeg, flour, butter. 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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