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Sauce

Currant Mint Sauce

A sauce made from currant jelly, mint leaves, and orange rind shavings, served with roast dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mint and orange work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 549 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Currant Mint Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Separate the currant jelly into pieces without beating it.

  2. Add the chopped mint leaves and orange rind shavings to the jelly.

  3. Serve the sauce around roast dishes.

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. Mint + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together549 recipes

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

  2. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Currant + minttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Provides the sweetness, body and fruity base that the sauce is built on.
Mint leaves
Adds a fresh, aromatic herbal note that cuts through the sweetness.
Orange rind
Adds bright citrus aroma and a touch of zesty acidity to the jelly.

The step that matters

Separating the jelly without beating it. Beating jelly breaks it down and makes it runny and loose, so it is better to separate it gently into pieces that keep their set and body.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mint, orange):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mint, orange. 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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