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Sausage Pudding

A steamed pudding made with pork sausages, onion, sage, and a butter‑flour sauce, wrapped in suet crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sausage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Line a moderate-sized pudding basin with a good suet crust.

  2. In a pan, fry the minced onion and sage leaves in butter until the onion turns yellow.

Make the sauce

  1. Dredge the flour over the mixture and stir well.

  2. Pour in 2–3 tablespoons of water, season with salt and cayenne, and let it cool.

  3. Strain the sauce over the sausages in the basin.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the pudding with the pastry, tie it in a pudding cloth, and plunge it into boiling water.

  2. Boil quickly until done, about 3 hours.

  3. Turn it out onto a hot dish and serve.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Sausages
Form the meaty body of the pudding, cooked gently within the crust and sauce.
Onion
Softens and turns sweet as it cooks, building the savoury base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the onion and sage into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and then mixed with liquid.
Sage leaves
Contribute a herbal aroma that flavours the fried onion and butter.

The step that matters

Dredge the flour over the mixture and stir well. Stirring the flour through the butter and onion coats each particle in fat so it blends without lumps. Cooking it with the fat also removes raw flour taste and lets the liquid thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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