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Sauce

Currant Jelly Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, onion, bay leaf, celery, vinegar, currant jelly, flour, stock, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Currant Jelly Sauce

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Currant Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat and add the chopped onion. Cook until the onion begins to color.

  2. Stir in the flour, bay leaf, and celery, and cook until browned.

  3. Add the stock and simmer for 20 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture and skim off any fat.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the strained sauce to the heat, add the currant jelly, and stir until melted. Serve with game.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Adds richness and fat, carrying the aromatic flavors of the onion.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and stock.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity flavor and helps give the sauce its gloss.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the sweetness of the jelly.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds savory depth.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until browned. Browning the flour with the butter and aromatics builds a nutty, deeper flavor and color. Cooking it too briefly leaves a raw taste, while cooking it too long can scorch and turn bitter.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, celery, vinegar, flour, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, celery, vinegar, flour, pepper. 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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