Name: Sweet Sauce, or Gravy for Venison
Ingredients: ½ cup common venison gravy; ⅓ cup port wine or claret; ½ ounce sugar in lumps

Why it works: Venison and port wine work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 239 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce, or Gravy for Venison

Ingredients

½ cup common venison gravy
⅓ cup port wine or claret
½ ounce sugar in lumps

Directions

Combine the venison gravy, port wine or claret, and sugar in a saucepan.
Stir until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is well combined.

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.

Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together239 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Port wine + sugartop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together805 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Venison + sugartop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together186 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Venison gravy: Forms the savoury base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Port wine or claret: Adds acidity and fruity depth that balances the richness of the gravy.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that rounds out the wine and gravy flavours.

“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.