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Old Sauce for Venison

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Old Sauce for Venison

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Simmer red wine, powdered sugar, and cinnamon until thick, without boiling.

  2. Cut bread into dice and soften it in water.

  3. Add softened bread to the sauce and remove the cinnamon.

  4. Boil the mixture together.

  5. Optionally, boil the bread with wine and spices until smooth, then add sugar after removing cinnamon.

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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Red wine + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together250 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol (whiskey, malt).

  3. Cinnamon + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,705 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Red wine + cinnamontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Red wine + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together864 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Swap the cinnamon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, sugar, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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