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Port Wine Sauce for Game

A sauce made with port wine, red currant jelly, salt, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and thick brown stock or gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Port Wine Sauce for Game

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pour the port wine into an earthen vessel.

  2. Add the melted red currant jelly, salt, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Stir in the thick brown stock or gravy.

  4. Place the vessel on the fire and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Once done, transfer to a sauce boat and serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Port wine + red curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Red currant + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together267 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine
Adds the main wine flavour and body to the sauce.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and helps thicken and gloss the sauce as it melts.
Thick brown stock or gravy
Provides savoury depth and body, giving the sauce its substance.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the sweetness of the jelly.

The step that matters

Bringing the sauce to a boil. Boiling reduces the liquid and concentrates flavour while the jelly and stock combine. Heating too gently can leave the sauce thin and the jelly unevenly dissolved.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

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