Skip to main content
Main

Venison Sauce

A sauce made from meat broth, browned flour, wine, currant jelly, cloves, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Currant and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,323 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Venison Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, bring the meat broth to a boil.

  2. Mix the browned flour with a little water to form a paste.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling broth.

  4. Season with cloves and coarse sea salt.

  5. Add the warm currant jelly and stir well.

  6. Just before serving, stir in the wine.

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 + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Flour + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Clove + winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-isoeugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Meat + clovetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Browned flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity tang that balances the rich broth.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to brighten the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the boiling broth. Flour added without first being mixed into a smooth paste will clump into lumps that are hard to remove. Whisking the paste thoroughly first, then adding it to the hot broth while stirring, lets the starch disperse evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, flour, clove, wine):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, flour, clove, wine. 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.

You might also like

Meat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipesMeat CakesMeat Cakes35 recipes