Name: Sauce Eor Widgeon, Teal, or Wild Duck
Ingredients: juice of ½ lemon; ½ cup port wine; ½ cup mushroom ketchup; ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper; 1 teaspoon powdered sugar

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sauce Eor Widgeon, Teal, or Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the lemon juice, port wine, mushroom ketchup, cayenne pepper, and powdered sugar in a saucepan.
Stir over low heat until the mixture simmers.
Pour the sauce over the birds in the dish.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ketchup + sugartop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together260 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Port wine + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together570 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lemon + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine: Adds depth, sweetness and fruity body to the sauce as it reduces slightly.
Mushroom ketchup: Contributes savoury umami flavour that gives the sauce its rich character.
Lemon juice: Provides acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness.
Powdered sugar: Adds a little sweetness that rounds out the sharp and savoury notes.

Swap the lemon

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

Lemonthe original
Red currantfits about as well
Figfits less well
Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, 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.