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Venison Pasty

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Venison Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the least-done part of the roast venison into neat squares and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Make a gravy by cooking bits of skin and refuse meat in a little water, boiling it down by half, then cool and season well.

  3. Finely chop the best parts of the tongue left from yesterday's soup.

  4. In a deep dish, layer the venison, sprinkle with butter bits rolled in flour, and cover with the minced tongue.

  5. Add a few bits of currant jelly on top, fill the dish, and pour on the gravy.

  6. Cover with a thick crust of pastry, bake until pale brown, then wash with egg white.

  7. Once the egg white hardens, brush with butter and close the oven door to glaze.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Venison + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, meat, butter, flour, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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