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Quin’s Game and Meat Sauce

A sauce made from butter, onions, shallots, garlic, carrot, parsnip, bay leaf, thyme, cloves, flour, port, gravy, cayenne, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,097 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Quin’s Game and Meat Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the onions, shallots, garlic, carrot, parsnip, bay leaf, thyme, and cloves; cook until they begin to color.

  3. Stir in the flour, port, and strong gravy; strain through a sieve.

  4. Season with cayenne and salt, then boil again.

Serve

  1. Strain the sauce over the meat.

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. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Parsnip + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together270 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Shallot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together63 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquids, giving it body.
Port
Adds sweetness and depth of flavor to the sauce.
Strong gravy
Provides the main savory liquid and meaty flavor of the sauce.
Onions
Caramelize slightly when cooked, adding sweetness and savory depth.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and carries the aromatics as they cook.

The step that matters

Cook the aromatics until they begin to color. Gentle browning of the onions, shallots and vegetables builds sweet, savory flavor through the Maillard reaction and caramelization. Stopping too early leaves the sauce flat, while over-browning can make it bitter.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, shallot, garlic, carrot, parsnip, thyme):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, shallot, garlic, carrot, parsnip, thyme. 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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