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Pork Sausages

A pork sausage made with finely chopped pork, salt, pepper, optional spices, and optional onion or parsley, then fried and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pork Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Mix the chopped pork with salt, pepper, sage, allspice, and cloves.

  2. Pack the mixture into stone pots or muslin bags, or fill cleaned hog or ox guts with it.

  3. To clean the guts, soak them in salt water or weak lime water for 3-4 days, then scrape and rinse them.

  4. If not using guts, shape the sausage meat into sausages, dip in beaten egg, then coat with flour or crackers.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the sausages in hot lard, turning until golden brown.

  2. Serve hot with boiled potatoes or hominy, drizzled with gravy made from the pan drippings.

  3. For gravy, stir a teaspoon of flour into the drippings, add boiling water, and let it boil before serving.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Sage + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together331 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sage + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together731 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the main meat and fat that give the sausage its body and juiciness.
Salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out proteins so the sausage binds together.
Beaten egg
Acts as a glue so the flour or cracker coating sticks to the sausage.
Wheat flour
Forms a dry coating that helps the sausages brown when fried.
Hot lard
Conducts heat for frying and adds fat that browns the outside of the sausages.

The step that matters

Cleaning the guts. Guts must be soaked and thoroughly rinsed so they are clean and pliable before filling. Insufficient cleaning leaves residue and off flavors, and tough casings can split during filling or cooking.

Swap the sage

The recipe marks sage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, allspice, clove, egg, wheat, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, allspice, clove, egg, wheat, onion. 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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