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Venison Steaks

Venison steaks cooked with butter, salt, pepper, currant jelly, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,083 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Venison Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim off the hard skin from the venison steaks and flatten each steak with the side of a hatchet.

  2. Butter the gridiron well and prepare a clear, hot fire.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook the steaks, turning often, for three to four minutes longer than you would cook beefsteaks.

  2. In a hot chafing dish, combine 1 tablespoon of butter, a pinch of coarse sea salt, a little black pepper, and 1 tablespoon of currant jelly for each pound of venison.

  3. Add 1 glass of white wine for every 4 pounds of venison and warm it using hot water beneath the dish.

  4. Once the venison is laid in the chafing dish, turn the steaks twice, cover, and let it stand for 5 minutes before serving.

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 + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Currant + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Pepper + white winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Venison + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together957 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 steaks
Provide the lean meat that is cooked and served in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps the steaks brown on the gridiron.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruit acidity that balances the rich, gamey meat.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the warm sauce in the chafing dish.

The step that matters

Cook the steaks over a clear, hot fire, turning often. Venison is very lean, so high heat sears the outside quickly while turning spreads heat evenly. Cooking too long or too slowly dries the meat and toughens its protein.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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

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