Skip to main content
Main

Venison Steak

Venison steak seasoned with salt and pepper, topped with butter and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Venison and currant work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 443 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Venison Steak

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Cook the venison steak as you would beefsteak, allowing a little more time for cooking.

Season and finish

  1. Place the cooked steak on a hot dish, season with salt and pepper.

  2. Beat butter to a cream and mix in currant jelly.

  3. Cover the steak with the butter and jelly mixture, let it melt, then turn the steak to coat the other side.

  4. 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.

  1. Venison + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together443 recipes

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

  2. Venison + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together957 recipes

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

  3. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  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 steak
Is the main protein, cooked as a beefsteak would be, with a little more time.
Butter
Melts over the hot steak to add richness and moisture to the surface.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity that balances the rich, gamey meat.

The step that matters

Cover the steak with the butter and jelly mixture, let it melt, then turn the steak to coat the other side.. The steak must be hot enough for the butter and jelly to melt into a glaze rather than sit as a cold layer. Turning the steak lets both sides take on the coating evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, pepper, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, butter. 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.

More venison steak recipes

Broiled 22Fried 17 See all 37 →

You might also like

Roast VenisonRoast Venison20 recipesVenison PastyVenison Pasty7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes