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Soup

Venison Soup

A soup made from powdered dried venison, water, flour, butter, salt, cayenne, and optional wine or sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the powdered venison in 2 quarts of water.

  2. In a separate pan, make a brown roux by browning the flour and butter together.

  3. Add the roux to the boiling venison broth.

  4. Season with salt and cayenne.

  5. For extra flavor, add a glass of wine or a little table sauce or ketchup.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

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

  4. Venison + winetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together189 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Flour + winetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

What each ingredient does

Powdered dried venison
Provides the meat flavor that forms the body of the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup when browned with butter into a roux.
Butter
Carries the flour into a roux and adds richness to the soup.

The step that matters

Browning the roux. Flour and butter cooked together must be stirred until evenly browned. Undercooked roux tastes raw and pasty, while overbrowned roux turns bitter and dark, and either will change the flavor of the soup.

“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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