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Sauce

Sauce for Wild Duck or Venison

A sauce made with wine, currant jelly, Harvey sauce, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, sea salt, gravy, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Sauce for Wild Duck or Venison

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the wine, red currant jelly, Harvey sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice, then add cayenne pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

  2. Stir in a little gravy and enough flour to thicken the sauce.

  3. Serve warm over wild duck or venison.

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. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body, and helps the sauce set as it cools.
Claret or port wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with liquid as it heats.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour. Flour must be stirred into warm liquid and cooked through, or it stays floury and lumpy. Adding it gradually and whisking keeps the sauce smooth and gives it an even, glossy body.

Swap the red currant

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

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

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