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Sauce

Sauce for Venison

A sauce made from currant jelly, port wine, salt, red pepper, lemon juice, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 for Venison

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine melted currant jelly, port wine, salt, red pepper, lemon juice, and stock in a saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture slowly until it is very hot.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Currant + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Port wine + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

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

  5. Port wine + lemontop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,100 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

Currant jelly
Provides sweetness and fruity body, and its gel-like sugar and pectin thicken the sauce as it melts and heats.
Port wine
Adds depth and acidity, giving the sauce a rich, fruity flavour that balances the jelly's sweetness.
Stock
Supplies liquid and savoury body, so the sauce is thinned to a pourable consistency.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet jelly and port and sharpens the overall flavour.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture slowly until it is very hot. Currant jelly is mostly sugar and pectin and can scorch on the base of the pan if heated too fast. Gentle, even heat lets the jelly melt fully into the liquids without burning, giving a smooth sauce.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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