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Game Sauce

A sweet and spicy plum sauce with onions, vinegar, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Game Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and onions

  1. Stone the plums and finely chop the onions and plums.

  2. Cook the plums in a saucepan.

  3. Cook the onions in vinegar in another pot.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the plums, sugar, and seasonings to the onions.

  2. Cook slowly at the back of the stove for several hours.

Bottle

  1. When cool, bottle tightly.

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. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Plum + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fruit base and pectin that thickens the sauce as it cooks down.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the sauce and give it body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the sauce.
Onions
Add savory depth and bulk that softens into the sauce during long cooking.

The step that matters

Cook slowly at the back of the stove for several hours. Low, gentle heat over a long time lets the fruit and onions break down and the liquid reduce into a thick sauce without scorching on the bottom of the pot. Stirring helps prevent sticking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, vinegar, sugar, pepper, cinnamon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, vinegar, sugar, pepper, cinnamon. 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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