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To Make Oyster Sausages

A sausage made from mutton, oysters, bread, eggs, onion, suet, lemon peel, and spices, fried in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Make Oyster Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Chop the flesh of the mutton as for force-meat.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, and mace.

  3. Mix well with the yolks of 4 eggs.

  4. Add the chopped oysters, grated French bread, chopped onion, beef suet, and lemon peel.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into sausages.

  2. Fry in butter until golden brown.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Mutton + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

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

Egg yolks
Bind the mixture together and enrich it so the sausages hold their shape.
French bread
Absorbs moisture and helps give the sausages a firmer, more cohesive texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the sausages moist and tender during frying.
Oysters
Contribute their briny, savoury flavour and a soft texture throughout the mixture.
Mutton
Forms the main body of the sausages, providing the meaty base and its flavour.

The step that matters

Fry in butter until golden brown. Frying over moderate heat browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, adding flavour and colour. Too little heat leaves the sausages pale and greasy, while too much can scorch the outside before the centre cooks through.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, oyster, bread, egg, onion, beef, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Pumpkinfits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, oyster, bread, egg, onion, beef, 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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