Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Sauce, or Gravy for Venison

A sweet sauce or gravy made with venison stock, port wine, butter, shallots, ham, carrot, herbs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce, or Gravy for Venison

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a thick saucepan, melt the butter over moderate heat.

  2. Add the shallots, ham, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, thyme, cloves, mace, and peppercorns.

  3. Stir the mixture for 20 minutes.

  4. Gradually add the veal stock or gravy and simmer gently for 30 to 40 minutes.

  5. Strain the sauce and skim off the fat before serving.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + carrottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together803 recipes

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

  4. Port wine + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries the aromatics as they soften.
Shallots
Soften into the base, adding mild sweetness and savoury depth.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour that deepens the gravy as it simmers.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the flavour base.
Port wine or claret
Adds acidity and fruity depth that balances the rich gravy.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture for 20 minutes. Cooking the shallots, ham and carrot slowly in butter draws out their sweetness and builds flavour without browning them too hard. Heat that is too high can scorch the butter and turn the base bitter.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, port wine, sugar, butter, shallot, ham, carrot):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, port wine, sugar, butter, shallot, ham, carrot. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRoast VenisonRoast Venison20 recipesVenison PastyVenison Pasty7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes