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White Sauce for Game

A sauce made with water, butter, bread crumbs, lemon rind, mace, cider, and sugar, cooked slowly and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

White Sauce for Game

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine 1 cup hot water and 1 cup butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons grated bread crumbs, grated rind of 1 lemon, and 1 blade mace.

  3. Cook slowly for about 5 minutes.

  4. Stir in 1 cup sweet cider and 2 or 3 lumps of loaf sugar, then let it boil.

  5. Serve.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mace + cidertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together658 recipes
  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth body as it melts into the liquid.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the sauce slightly and give it body as they soften in the liquid.
Sweet cider
Adds fruity sweetness and liquid volume to the sauce.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the lemon and cider.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, lemon, cider, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, lemon, cider, sugar. 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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