Skip to main content
Main

Sausages

A recipe for homemade sausages using cleaned guts, meat, and optional ingredients, fried in lard and served with potatoes or hominy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the cleaned guts in salt and water for 3-4 days, turning them inside out and scraping them.

  2. Rinse the guts and fill them with meat.

  3. If not using guts, shape the sausage meat into sausages.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the sausages in beaten egg, then coat them with flour or crackers.

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

Serve

  1. Serve hot with boiled potatoes or hominy, drizzled with gravy.

  2. For the gravy, stir a teaspoon of flour into the pan, add boiling water, and let it boil before serving with the sausages.

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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  3. Wheat + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

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

  5. Wheat + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together345 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Forms the filling or shaped body of the sausage, giving it its main flavour and bulk.
Beaten egg
Acts as a binder so the flour or cracker coating sticks to the sausage.
Wheat flour or rolled crackers
Forms a coating that browns and crisps when fried.
Hot lard
Conducts heat to brown the outside and adds rich flavour to the sausages.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. The lard must be hot enough to brown the coating quickly. Too cool and the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy before the sausage is cooked through; too hot and it burns outside first.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg, wheat, potato, parsley):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, wheat, potato, parsley. 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.

More sausages recipes

Fried 30Oyster 30Pork 17Beef 16Veal 10Homemade 7 See all 27 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes