Name: Venison, Fried
Ingredients: Venison, sliced; Butter; Flour; Finely powdered sugar (optional); Gravy made from bones; Red wine; Lemon; Currant jelly (for serving)

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, Fried

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the venison into slices.
Make gravy from the bones.
Fry the venison steaks until light brown and keep them warm.
In a pan, combine butter and flour, stirring until thick and brown.
Add finely powdered sugar (if using), the gravy, and red wine; cook until the sauce is the thickness of cream.
Squeeze in lemon juice and warm the venison in the sauce.
Place the venison on a dish and pour the sauce over it.
Serve with currant jelly on the side.

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.

Venison + red winetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together167 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Venison + curranttop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together443 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Red wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together113 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, butter, flour, sugar, red wine, currant):

Red currantfits better
Plumfits better
Applefits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, butter, flour, sugar, red wine, currant. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.