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Bread and Sausage Stuffing

A savory stuffing made from stale bread crumbs, cooked sausage, herbs, and optional butter and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Bread and Sausage Stuffing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook sausage until moderately brown, discard any skin, and chop the meat moderately fine.

  2. Mix the sausage with the bread crumbs and the fat drawn from the sausage.

  3. If there isn't enough fat, add melted butter to moisten the mixture.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and pepper to taste.

  5. If a firm dressing is desired for slicing cold, add the beaten egg.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 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

Stale bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the stuffing and absorb the fat and moisture from the sausage.
Cooked sausage meat
Provides the main flavor and fat that moistens the crumbs.
Small egg
Binds the mixture so it holds a firm shape when sliced cold.
Melted butter
Adds moisture and richness when the sausage gives too little fat.

The step that matters

Cook sausage until moderately brown. Browning the sausage develops flavor through the Maillard reaction, and the fat it releases is needed to moisten the crumbs. Undercooking leaves the meat pale and greasy, while overcooking dries it out.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, meat, lemon, pepper, butter, egg):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, meat, lemon, pepper, butter, egg. 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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