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Smoked Pork Sausage

A smoked sausage made from lean beef, pork, and fresh pork seasoned with pepper, allspice, mace, cayenne, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Smoked Pork Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Chop the lean beef very fine.

  2. Add the fairly lean pork and chop again.

  3. Add the fresh pork and mix well with a little water.

Season and stuff

  1. Season with black pepper, cayenne pepper, mace, allspice, and salt to taste.

  2. Mix into a stiff paste and stuff into hog casings.

Dry and smoke

  1. Hang the sausages around a stick to dry for 12 hours.

  2. Smoke over a cool fire for 6 hours, turning them occasionally for even smoking.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Lean beef
Provides the main lean meat that gives the sausage its firm bite and body.
Fairly lean pork
Adds meaty structure while keeping the mixture from becoming too dry.
Fresh pork
Adds fat, which carries flavour and keeps the cooked sausage moist and tender.

The step that matters

Smoking over a cool fire. A cool fire flavours and dries the sausage slowly without fully cooking the meat. Turning the sausages regularly gives even smoke exposure and colour, so one side does not darken or dry out faster than the rest.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, pepper, allspice):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, pepper, allspice. 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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