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Sauce

Port Wine Sauce for Game

A sauce made with port wine, currant jelly, stock, lemon juice, cloves, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

  1. Simmer the cloves and stock together for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture over the other ingredients.

  3. Let all ingredients melt together.

  4. Optionally, add part of the 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.

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

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. 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

Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour, and thickens the sauce to a glossy body as it melts.
Port wine
Adds fruity depth and sweetness, and a rich, wine-based aroma to the sauce.
Stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that the other flavours dissolve into.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness of the jelly and port.
Cloves
Infuse a warm, aromatic spice flavour into the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Let all ingredients melt together. Currant jelly is set by sugar and pectin and only dissolves smoothly when warm. Letting it melt fully into the hot liquid, rather than rushing, prevents lumps and gives an even, glossy sauce.

Swap the currant

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

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

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