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Sauce

Salmis Sauce

A sauce made with red currant jelly, Espagnole sauce, game stock, shallots, bay leaf, thyme, mushroom trimmings, port wine, and sweet oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,476 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Salmis Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the shallots until golden.

  2. Add the bay leaf, thyme, mushroom trimmings, and port wine, then cover and cook for 5 minutes.

  3. Stir in the stock and Espagnole sauce, simmer for 10 minutes, and remove any scum.

  4. Strain the sauce through a fine cloth, season, add the red-currant jelly, warm it up, and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Currant + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Shallot + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Red-currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity tang that balances the rich, savoury sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Provides the thick, flavourful brown sauce base that the other ingredients are added to.
Game stock
Adds depth and meaty body to the sauce base.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth, reducing with the aromatics to a rounder flavour.
Shallots
Provide a mild, sweet onion aroma once softened and browned in the oil.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum while simmering. Simmering the sauce lifts impurities and proteins to the surface as scum. Removing them keeps the sauce clear and prevents a bitter or cloudy taste.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, shallot, thyme, mushroom, port wine):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, shallot, thyme, mushroom, 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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