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Sauce

Quin’s Game and Meat Sauce

A sauce made with butter, onions, eschalots, 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.

  2. Add the onions, eschalots, garlic, carrot, parsnip, bay leaf, thyme, and cloves, then cook over medium heat until it begins to color.

  3. Stir in a dust of flour, then add the port and strong gravy.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  5. 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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building the savory base of the sauce.
Port
Adds sweetness and depth, and its acidity balances the rich gravy.
Strong gravy
Provides the main liquid and savory body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce slightly as it is stirred into the cooked vegetables.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness and flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables until they begin to color. Light browning of the onions and other vegetables develops sweet, deeper flavors through caramelization and Maillard reactions. Pale vegetables would leave the sauce tasting flat.

Swap the clove

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

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

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