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Sausages a LA Creole

A Creole-style rice dish with sausage, tomato juice, onion, and flour, served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sausages a LA Creole

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the minced onion in flour until cooked, being careful not to burn it.

  2. Add the strained tomato juice to the onion mixture, then stir in the rice and sausage pieces.

Prepare the rice

  1. Slowly heat the cold boiled rice, beating it until soft and fine, adding milk as needed.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the saucepan and cook until everything is heated through.

  2. Serve with slices of hot buttered toast.

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. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Cold boiled rice
Forms the body of the dish when beaten soft, giving it a smooth, starchy texture.
Sausage
Adds savoury, meaty flavour and richness throughout the dish.
Onion
Provides aromatic sweetness and depth once cooked gently in the flour.
Flour
Cooked with the onion to form a roux that helps thicken the mixture.
Strained tomato juice
Adds acidity and tomato flavour, and moisture that loosens the rice mixture.

The step that matters

Fry the onion in flour without burning it. Scorched flour and onion turn bitter and dark, which spoils the flavour of the whole dish. Cooking gently until the raw starch taste fades gives a mild, nutty base for the sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, tomato, milk):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, tomato, milk. 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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