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Sauce

Sauce Oporto- -port Wine Sauce

A sauce made with port wine, peppercorns, game broth, currant jelly, and brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Port wine and currant 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 ↓

Sauce Oporto- -port Wine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, reduce ½ cup port wine with 12 peppercorns until it reduces to ¼ cup.

  2. Add ½ cup game broth and reduce to half.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon currant jelly and 1 pint brown sauce.

  4. Reduce to a good consistency and strain the sauce.

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. Port wine + curranttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Port wine + saucetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + saucetop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together628 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine
Reduced to concentrate flavour and add fruity depth and sweetness to the sauce.
Game broth
Adds savoury body and liquid that reduces into the sauce's base flavour.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a touch of acidity that balances the rich brown sauce.
Brown sauce
Forms the thick savoury base that gives the sauce its body and colour.

The step that matters

Reduce to a good consistency. Reducing concentrates flavour and thickens the liquid as water evaporates. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and watery, while over-reducing makes it too salty and sticky once the brown sauce concentrates.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, sauce. 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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