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Venison Pasty

A pastry filled with seasoned venison and mutton, baked with a pastry crust and topped with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and mutton work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 279 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Venison Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Bone and season the neck and breast of venison with salt and pepper.

  2. Slice the neck of mutton and place it in a pan with the venison.

  3. Pour in the red wine.

Bake

  1. Cover with coarse pastry and bake for 2 hours.

Assemble and finish

  1. Transfer the venison to a dish.

  2. Pour the gravy over it.

  3. Add butter on top.

  4. Roll out a thicker lid for the dish.

  5. Place the thicker lid on top.

  6. Roll out another thin lid.

  7. Cut the thin lid into desired shapes.

  8. Place the shaped lid on the thicker lid.

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 + muttontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

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

  2. Venison + red winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Red wine + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Red wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  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
Provides the main meat, whose flavour and texture form the body of the pasty.
Mutton
Adds rich, savoury meat flavour and body to the filling.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the gravy as it cooks with the meat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished dish a rich mouthfeel.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and forms the crust that seals in moisture while baking.

The step that matters

Cover with coarse pastry and bake for 2 hours. The pastry must seal the pan well so moisture and juices stay in during the long bake. A tight seal keeps the meat tender and the gravy concentrated rather than drying out.

“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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