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Sauce

Currant Sauce for Venison

A sauce made with currants, bread crumbs, béchamel, venison gravy, port, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and venison work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 443 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Currant Sauce for Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Boil the washed currants in ½ pint of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Pour the currants over the bread crumbs and let them sit for a while.

  3. Beat the bread crumbs and currants together.

Finish the sauce

  1. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and stir over heat until smooth.

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. Currant + venisontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together443 recipes

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

  2. Bread + venisontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  4. Bread + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,934 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + venisontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together208 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide tart fruit flavour and body that balances the rich venison.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the sauce, giving it body.
Bechamel sauce
Adds a creamy, thickened base that smooths the texture.
Venison gravy
Supplies savoury, meaty depth as the main liquid base.
Port
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the sauce.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and gloss, and its pectin helps the sauce set.

The step that matters

Stirring over heat until smooth. Bread crumbs and Bechamel thicken as their starch hydrates and swells. Stirring constantly spreads the heat and prevents scorching on the base of the pan and lumps forming as the sauce thickens.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sauce, venison):

  1. Red currantfits about as well
  2. Currantthe original
  3. Pumpkinfits about as well
  4. Applefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sauce, venison. 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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