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Game Sauce

A sauce made from game trimmings, vegetables, sherry, and Espagnole sauce, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Game Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the bones and trimmings of the game into small pieces.

  2. Cut the vegetables into thin slices.

Make the sauce

  1. Put all ingredients into a saucepan, add the sherry, herbs, and seasoning, and simmer for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the Espagnole sauce, bring to a boil, then cook slowly for 15 minutes.

  3. Pass through a fine cloth, reheat, and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper if necessary.

  4. Serve hot.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 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

Espagnole sauce
Provides the rich, thickened brown base that gives the sauce its body and depth.
Game trimmings and carcasses
Supply concentrated meaty flavour as they simmer and release their juices into the sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic sweetness that brightens the rich, savoury base.

The step that matters

Passing through a fine cloth. Straining removes bone fragments, vegetables and herbs so the sauce is smooth. Pressing too hard or skipping the fine cloth leaves grit and cloudiness in the finished sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, sherry, onion, carrot, turnip, parsley, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, sherry, onion, carrot, turnip, parsley, 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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