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Sauce

Currant Jell Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, nuts, herbs, stock, lemon, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Currant Jell Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter and add nuts, bay leaf, parsley, and cloves.

  2. Stir until mixture becomes dark brown.

  3. Slowly add soup stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Add lemon juice.

  5. Add currant jelly.

  6. Season with salt and pepper.

  7. Simmer for 3 minutes.

  8. Strain and serve.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat for cooking the aromatics and adds rich flavour to the sauce.
Chopped nuts
Browned in the butter to add a toasted, nutty aroma.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour, and thickens the sauce as it dissolves.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the currant jelly.

The step that matters

Stir until mixture becomes dark brown. The nuts and butter must brown deeply for a toasted flavour, but if they burn the sauce turns bitter. Stir constantly and watch closely for the colour change.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, nuts, parsley, clove, lemon, pepper):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nuts, parsley, clove, lemon, pepper. 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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