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Cervelas, or Smoked Sausage

A smoked pork sausage made with lean pork, bacon fat, spices, and herbs, boiled and served cold with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,331 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cervelas, or Smoked Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sausage

  1. Chop the lean pork and bacon fat together, ensuring bacon fat makes up ¼ of the mixture.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper, coarse sea salt, coriander, allspice, and nutmeg.

  3. Stuff the mixture into sausage skins and form into lengths.

Smoke and cook

  1. Smoke the sausages for three days.

  2. Boil the smoked sausages in a seasoned liquid with herbs and vinegar.

Serve

  1. Serve cold on a napkin or slice, tossing in butter.

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. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Coriander + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + coriandertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,949 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Lean pork
Provides the main lean meat that forms the body of the sausage.
Bacon fat
Adds fat for moisture and juiciness in the chopped sausage mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat when tossed over the sliced sausage.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, meat, pepper, allspice, nutmeg, vinegar, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, meat, pepper, allspice, nutmeg, vinegar, 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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