Name: Fawn, Hashed
Ingredients: 6 mushrooms; 1 shallot; 1 pint good gravy (from venison or mutton); coarse sea salt; pepper; slices of cold fawn; 1 teaspoon lemon juice; 1 teaspoon sugar; ⅓ cup port wine

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Fawn, Hashed

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the mushrooms and shallot in the gravy for 30 minutes.
Season with salt and pepper.
Add the slices of cold fawn to the stewpan and heat through.
Stir in the lemon juice, sugar, and port wine.
Let it stand by the fire for a few minutes and serve hot.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,982 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,523 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Shallot + port winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together380 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together239 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms: Release earthy flavour and moisture into the gravy as they stew.
Good gravy: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the whole hash.
Port wine: Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce as it is stirred in at the end.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and meat.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, shallot, venison, pepper, sugar, port wine):

Red currantfits about as well
Lemonthe original
Plumfits about as well
Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, shallot, venison, pepper, sugar, port wine. 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.