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Sauce

Port Wine Sauce for Game

A sauce made with port wine, currant jelly, stock, lemon juice, cloves, salt, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 356 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Port Wine Sauce for Game

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the stock

  1. Simmer the cloves and stock together for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture over the other ingredients.

Finish the sauce

  1. Let all the ingredients melt together.

  2. Optionally, add some gravy from the 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.

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. Currant + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Port wine + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Currant + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 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
Melts into the sauce to add sweetness and body.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and rich, fruity depth to the sauce.
Stock
Forms the savory liquid base that the other ingredients blend into.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the sweetness.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, port wine, clove):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against currant, port wine, clove. 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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