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Sauce

Currant-Jelly Sauce

A sauce made from currant jelly, port wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Currant-Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine currant jelly and port wine.

  2. Heat over low flame until melted, stirring occasionally.

  3. If the jelly is too thick, add more wine and sugar to taste.

  4. Allow the mixture to boil briefly before serving.

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. Port wine + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together805 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Provides the base body, fruity sweetness and set that gives the sauce its character.
Port wine
Thins the melted jelly and adds depth and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Melting the jelly over low heat. Heating slowly over low flame melts the jelly evenly without scorching its sugars, and stirring keeps it from sticking and burning on the pan base.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, sugar. 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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