Skip to main content
Main

Best Way of Cooking Venison

Thin slices of venison cooked with butter, currant jelly, coarse sea salt, and pepper.

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 ↓

Best Way of Cooking Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the thin slices of venison.

  2. Place the pounded slices on a dish.

  3. Set a chafing dish on the table.

Cook at the table

  1. Add some venison slices to the chafing dish.

  2. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Add a lump of butter.

  4. Add some currant jelly.

  5. Cover the dish.

  6. Let it sit for 1-2 minutes.

  7. Remove the cover.

  8. Turn the slices of meat.

  9. Cover again.

  10. Cook for an additional 2-3 minutes until the venison is cooked to your liking.

  11. Each person can add pepper to taste.

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. Butter + peppertop 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
Forms the main body of the dish; thin pounded slices cook quickly and evenly.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying heat across the meat and helping it brown lightly.
Currant jelly
Melts into the hot pan, adding sweetness and a tart fruit note that balances the rich meat.

The step that matters

Turning and timing the slices. Thin venison cooks in minutes and dries out quickly. Covering the dish traps steam that cooks the meat gently, so checking doneness after the extra 2-3 minutes prevents overcooking.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

You might also like

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