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Sauce for Fillets of Wild Duck

A sauce made with currant jelly, port wine, Seville orange, cayenne pepper, and mustard for wild duck fillets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 356 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sauce for Fillets of Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine currant jelly, port wine, orange rind, orange juice, cayenne pepper, and mustard in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil while stirring continuously.

Serve

  1. Remove the orange peel and pour the hot sauce over the fillets.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Orange + mustardtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together541 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body, and helps the sauce thicken as it reduces.
Port wine
Contributes depth and fruity sweetness to the sauce base.
Seville orange
Provides bright acidity and aromatic oil from the rind.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharp tang that balances the sweetness of the jelly and wine.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil while stirring continuously. Constant stirring keeps the jelly from scorching on the pan bottom and helps it dissolve evenly into the wine and juice, so the sauce stays smooth and does not burn.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, orange, pepper, mustard. 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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