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Pork Sausages

A traditional pork sausage made with pork, salt, spices, and optional onion and parsley, then fried and served with potatoes or hominy.

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. Chop the pork finely and mix with salt, pepper, sage or thyme, allspice, and cloves.

  2. Pack the mixture into stone pots, muslin bags, or clean hog or ox guts.

  3. If using guts, soak them in salt water or weak lime water for 3-4 days, then clean and fill with the meat.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the sausage meat into sausages, dip in beaten egg, then coat with flour or crackers.

  2. Optionally, add chopped onion and parsley to the sausage meat before frying.

Fry and serve

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

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

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 body and fat that keep the sausage juicy and rich.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw out moisture and bind the mixture.
Ground allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the sausage meat.
Ground cloves
Adds strong, warm aromatic flavour in small amounts.
Beaten egg
Helps the flour or cracker coating stick to the sausage surface.
Wheat flour or rolled crackers
Forms a coating that browns when fried, giving a crisp golden crust.

The step that matters

Fry in hot lard, turning until golden brown. Frying in hot fat browns the coating through the Maillard reaction and sets the outside, while the meat cooks through. Lard that is too cool lets the coating soak up grease and stay pale and soft.

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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