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Venison Sauce

A sauce made from the natural juice of cooked venison, thickened with flour or cornflour or arrowroot, flavored with wine, stock, or water, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and port wine work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 239 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Venison Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strain the natural juice from the cooked venison into a saucepan.

  2. Remove all fatty matter from the juice.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix 1 teaspoon of flour, cornflour, or arrowroot with ½ cup of port wine, sherry, Madeira, stock, or water.

  2. Combine this mixture with the juice and bring to a boil.

  3. Add lemon juice or any condiment according to taste.

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

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

  2. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Port wine + lemontop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

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

  4. Flour + port winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,167 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Venison + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together667 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Natural juice from cooking venison
Forms the savoury base of the sauce and carries the meat flavour.
Flour, cornflour or arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated to a boil.
Port wine, sherry, madeira or stock
Adds liquid to dilute the juice and contributes depth and some sweetness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Bringing the thickened mixture to a boil. Starch granules only swell and thicken the sauce once heated to boiling. Mixing the starch with cold liquid first and stirring it into the juice helps prevent lumps. Stop short of a long, hard boil, since it can thin the sauce again.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Currantfits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, flour, port wine. 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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