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Sausages, Smoked with Cumin

Sausages made from beef, pork, and bacon, seasoned with cumin, pepper, pimento, and garlic, then smoked and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cumin and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,082 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sausages, Smoked with Cumin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. In a large bowl, combine the chopped beef and salt, then add the saltpetre.

  2. In another bowl, mix the chopped pork and fat bacon.

  3. Combine both meat mixtures and season with black pepper, pimento, cumin, and garlic.

  4. Mince the mixture for a few minutes, gradually adding water until well combined.

Fill and cure

  1. Fill sheep's guts with the meat mixture, tie at intervals, and hang in a cool place for a few hours.

  2. Smoke the sausages gently for a few hours.

Cook and cool

  1. Boil the sausages in water for 5 minutes and let 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. Cumin + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,082 recipes

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

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  3. Cumin + clovetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,306 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + cumintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,382 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the lean muscle structure and meaty bulk of the sausage.
Pork
Adds moisture and tenderness to the lean beef base.
Fat bacon
Supplies fat that keeps the sausage juicy and carries flavour.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives it a characteristic cured colour.
Cumin
Contributes the dominant warm, earthy aroma of the sausage.

The step that matters

Mincing with water. Gradually adding water while mincing helps the meat bind and stay moist. Adding it all at once can make the mixture loose and uneven.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, meat, pepper, cumin, garlic):

  1. Oreganofits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, meat, pepper, cumin, garlic. 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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