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Currant Sauce

A thickened sauce made with soup stock, currant jelly, lemon, and spices, served with game or poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add soup stock, cloves, salt, black pepper, currant jelly, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Mix cornstarch with a little water to form a slurry, then stir into the sauce.

  5. Cook until thickened, then serve with game or poultry.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Clove + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Provides the sweetness and fruity flavour that defines the sauce.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid into a glossy sauce once heated.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Soup stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that the other flavours are built on.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balances the sweet jelly.

The step that matters

Adding the cornstarch slurry. Cornstarch must be mixed with cold water before it goes into hot liquid, otherwise it clumps. Once the sauce reaches a boil and is cooked for a short time, the starch swells and thickens it properly.

Swap the currant

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

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

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