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Sauce

Jelly Sauce

A sauce made from brown sauce and currant jelly, served with game, lamb, or mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare a cup of brown sauce using butter, browned flour, and a little caramel.

  2. Heat the brown sauce until boiling hot, then stir in 4 to 5 teaspoons of currant jelly or other tart jelly.

  3. Serve the sauce with game, lamb, or mutton.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Sauce + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

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

Currant jelly
Adds tartness and a fruity sweetness that balances the rich brown sauce.
Brown sauce
Provides the savoury, rich body that the jelly is stirred into.

The step that matters

Stirring in the jelly once the sauce is boiling hot. Jelly is mostly sugar and pectin; when it is stirred into a very hot sauce it dissolves smoothly and stays glossy, while overheating can make the flavour dull and the sauce overly sweet.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, butter, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, butter, flour. 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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