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Venison Stewed

A stew of venison steaks rolled with bread crumbs, onion, butter, pepper, salt, thyme, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and thyme are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Venison Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut venison into small steaks.

  2. Make a dressing with bread crumbs, onion, butter (or pork), pepper, salt, and thyme.

  3. Spread the dressing on each steak, then roll and tie them.

Cook

  1. Put the rolled steaks into boiling water and stew.

  2. Thicken the gravy with flour.

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. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Venison steaks
Provide the meat that is cooked slowly until tender in the stew.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices and moisture from the dressing, keeping the filling soft inside the rolled steak.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dressing, carrying flavor and keeping the filling moist.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory depth to the dressing.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy by swelling with heat and binding the liquid.

The step that matters

Stew the rolled steaks gently. Venison is lean and can turn tough if boiled hard. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue soften slowly, keeping the meat tender while the dressing stays moist inside.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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