Name: Wine Sauce for Game
Ingredients: ½ cup port wine; ½ cup water; 1 tablespoon cold butter; 1 teaspoon salt; Juice of ½ lemon; A pinch of cayenne pepper; 3 cloves; A few spoonfuls of gravy from the game (optional); ½ cup currant jelly (optional)

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Wine Sauce for Game

Ingredients

Directions

Combine port wine, water, cold butter, salt, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and cloves in a saucepan.
Simmer the mixture for a few minutes.
Strain the sauce and add the wine back in.
If desired, stir in a few spoonfuls of gravy from the game.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Port wine + curranttop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together356 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,150 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Port wine + clovetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together914 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine: Provides the main flavour and acidity, and helps build the body of the sauce.
Cold butter: Adds richness and gloss, and thickens the sauce slightly when whisked in cold.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich wine and game flavours.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, butter, lemon, pepper, clove):

Figfits better
Orangefits better
Limefits better
Currantthe original

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