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Sauce

Sauce for Friar Tuck’s Mock Venison Pastry Pie

A sauce made with stock or gravy, powdered oysters, port wine, and lime juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and port wine work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 89 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Sauce for Friar Tuck’s Mock Venison Pastry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pour some stock or gravy into the pan used for browning the chops and sausages.

  2. Add the bruised and powdered oysters and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Make a hole in the center of the pie crust and pour in the sauce using a lipped sauce-boat.

  2. Serve hot by cutting the pie and adding the sauce at the last moment.

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. Oyster + port winetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Port wine + limetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Oyster + limetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Bruised and powdered oysters add a savory, briny depth that gives the sauce its character.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity richness to balance the savory stock.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and cuts through its richness.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Currantfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, 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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