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Excellent Sausage Cake

A pork and bacon sausage mixture wrapped in pig's caul and broiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Excellent Sausage Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Detach skin and bone from the pork and chop it finely.

  2. Add the bacon, salt, pepper, nutmeg, onions, and parsley to the pork and mix well.

  3. Pound the mixture in a mortar until well combined, then mix in the eggs.

Wrap and cook

  1. Take a piece of the mixture the size of an egg and wrap it in a piece of pig's caul, shaping it into a flattened egg.

  2. Broil the wrapped mixture gently over a moderate fire until cooked.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 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

Lean pork
Provides the main meaty body and substance of the cake.
Fat bacon
Adds fat that keeps the mixture moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the minced mixture together so it holds its shape.
Pig's caul
Wraps the mixture, holding its shape and adding moisture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Broil the wrapped mixture gently. Gentle heat over a moderate fire lets the eggs set and the fat render slowly through the mixture, so the centre cooks through without drying or toughening the outside.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, egg. 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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