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Meat Sausages for Breakfast

A breakfast dish of minced meat sausages flavored with pepper, salt, herbs, and lemon, fried and served with apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Meat Sausages for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine minced cold meat, egg, chopped pork, pepper, coarse sea salt, powdered sage or sweet herbs, and lemon juice.

  2. Mix all ingredients well.

  3. Form the mixture into balls.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a mixture of butter and lard in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the meatballs until golden brown.

  3. Serve with apple sauce or fried apples.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  4. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

  5. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Chopped pork
Provides the bulk of the meat and fat that keeps the sausage juicy when cooked.
Cold minced meat
Finely minced and kept cold so the fat stays firm, giving a tender, well-bound texture.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the sausage holds its shape while frying.
Butter and lard
Fat for frying that helps the surface brown and adds flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the meatballs until golden brown. Cook over medium heat so the outside browns while the centre cooks through; too high a heat can scorch the surface before the inside is done, and the cold fat must stay in the mixture to keep the sausage juicy.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg, pork, pepper, sage, lemon, butter):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, pork, pepper, sage, lemon, 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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