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Venison Pudding

A boiled pudding made with venison, gravy, port wine, and pastry lining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Venison Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the venison into neat pieces, combining fat and lean meat, and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Place the meat in a saucepan, cover with water, and simmer gently for 45 minutes.

  3. Remove the meat and let it cool.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Line a pudding basin with pastry, add the venison, and pour over the gravy mixed with port wine.

  2. Seal the edges of the pastry to prevent gravy from escaping.

  3. Wring out a pudding cloth with boiling water, dust it with flour, and tie the pudding loosely in it.

Boil and serve

  1. Plunge the pudding into boiling water and boil for about 1.5 hours.

  2. Let it stand for a few minutes before turning it out.

  3. Serve the remaining gravy in a tureen.

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. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + port winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Port wine + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,167 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Venison
Forms the main body of the filling, providing the meaty flavour and chewy texture of the pudding.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and holds the gravy in during the long boil.
Gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth so the filling stays juicy.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and richness to the gravy, deepening the flavour of the filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the pastry edges. If the seal is weak, gravy can leak out during the long boil, leaving the filling dry and the pudding watery in the pot. A tight seam keeps the moisture inside the pastry.

“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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