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Boiled Venison or Veal

A boiled venison or veal dish simmered with onions, spices, lemon, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and port wine work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 239 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Boiled Venison or Veal

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter or dripping.

  2. Dust the pan and the meat with flour, then brown the meat.

  3. Nearly cover the meat with warm water.

  4. Add the onions, white pepper, salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  5. Pour in the port wine and simmer until the meat is tender.

  6. Serve the gravy over the meat.

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 + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Venison + meattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together126 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Venison or veal
The main protein; simmering slowly turns its connective tissue tender.
Flour
Dusted on the meat before browning, it helps form a richer, thicker gravy.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the gravy.
Lemon
Its juice and rind add acidity and bright aroma to the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer until the meat is tender. Gentle simmering over low heat lets connective tissue break down slowly. Boiling hard can toughen the proteins and leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, venison, onion, lemon, port wine, meat):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, venison, onion, lemon, port wine, meat. 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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