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Wild-boar, with Sour-sweet Sauce, Roman Fashion

A roasted wild boar served with a sauce of powdered sugar, spice cakes, pine nuts, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pine and nuts work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Wild-boar, with Sour-sweet Sauce, Roman Fashion

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Remove the skin from the wild boar and place the meat in a bowl.

  2. Moisten the meat with the cooked marinate and let it marinate for 2 days.

  3. Drain the meat, pat it dry, and fry it in hog's lard over moderate heat until browned.

  4. Sprinkle the powdered sugar over the meat and moisten with reserved marinate.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. Boil the liquid until the meat is three-quarters cooked, then keep the meat warm.

  2. Strain the cooking stock to remove fat.

  3. Soften the spice cakes in tepid water, crush them, and dilute with some cooking stock.

  4. Combine the diluted paste with the cooking stock and boil until thickened.

  5. Pour the sauce over the wild boar and cook on low heat, basting frequently.

  6. Ten minutes before serving, stir in the currants.

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. Pine + nutstop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  4. Nuts + curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together133 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + pinetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

What each ingredient does

Wild boar
Provides the main meat, which the marinade tenderises and the frying browns.
Spice cakes
Crushed and dissolved into the stock, they thicken the sauce and add its spiced flavour.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp notes of the marinade and sauce.
Currants
Add small bursts of sweetness and fruitiness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the meat in hog's lard. Frying over moderate heat until browned builds the surface flavour through the Maillard reaction. The meat must be dry first, since surface moisture steams it instead of browning it.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, pine, nuts):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pine, nuts. 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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