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Venison Pasty

A cold venison pie with pastry, bacon, and forcemeat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and red wine work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Venison Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Bone the neck and breast of venison and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the meat in a pan with ½ cup red wine and a little gravy, and stew for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the meat from the pan and drain it.

Assemble and serve

  1. Roll out the pastry.

  2. When the meat is cold, place it on a layer of forcemeat.

  3. Cover the meat with slices of fat bacon.

  4. Finish assembling the pie.

  5. Serve it cold.

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. Venison + red winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Venison + peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together955 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Neck and breast of venison
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Forcemeat
Forms a seasoned layer beneath the meat, adding moisture and richness to the filling.
Slices of fat bacon
Covers the meat with fat that bastes it and adds savoury flavour.
½ cup red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Let the meat cool before assembling. The record says the meat should be cold before it is placed on the forcemeat. Placing warm meat on raw forcemeat can partly cook and loosen it, and the fat can melt into the filling, so the pie may not hold its shape well.

“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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