Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Sauce, or Gravy for Venison

A sweet gravy made with venison stock, port wine, butter, and aromatics, simmered to a rich sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce, or Gravy for Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the sliced shallots, ham, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, thyme, cloves, mace, and peppercorns.

  3. Stir the mixture for 20 minutes over medium heat.

Finish the sauce

  1. Gradually add 1 pint of strong veal stock or gravy and simmer gently for 30 to 40 minutes.

  2. Strain the sauce, skim off the fat, 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + carrottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together803 recipes

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

  4. Port wine + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

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

  5. Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together239 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

Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness and a rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Shallots
Soften during stirring and add a mild, sweet onion-like aroma to the base.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth that fills out the flavour of the venison gravy.
Carrot
Releases natural sugars as it cooks, adding gentle sweetness and body.
Port wine or claret
Adds fruity acidity and wine flavour that brightens and deepens the sauce.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the acidity of the wine.

The step that matters

Stirring the vegetables over medium heat for 20 minutes. The shallots, ham and carrot should soften and release their flavour without browning or scorching. Scorched solids turn bitter and can darken the sauce, so keep the heat moderate and stir often.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, port wine, sugar, butter, shallot, ham, carrot):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, port wine, sugar, butter, shallot, ham, carrot. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRoast VenisonRoast Venison20 recipesVenison PastyVenison Pasty7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes