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Sauce

Currant Jelly Sauce

Sauce made from brown stock, onion, celery, currant jelly, and optional port wine, served with game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Currant Jelly Sauce

Why it works: Onion and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,518 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Currant Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. After taking your roast out, add the brown stock, minced onion, and celery to the pan.

  2. Simmer the mixture and then strain it.

  3. Thicken the strained sauce and beat in the currant jelly.

  4. Add port wine if desired, and 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. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Celery + port winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  4. Onion + port winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Celery + curranttop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 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

Brown stock
Forms the savory liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity, and thickens the sauce as it dissolves.
Onion
Contributes aromatic flavor as it softens and infuses the stock.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, port wine. 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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