Name: Venison
Ingredients: venison (neck or breast); butter; flour; ½ pound powdered sugar; red wine; juice of 1 lemon

Why it works: Venison and red wine work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Bone the venison if it's neck or breast; slice the meat off the bone if it's shoulder.
Make gravy with the bones.
Fry the meat until light brown and keep it warm.
In the pan, add flour to the butter and stir until thick and brown.
Stir in powdered sugar, add the gravy, and some red wine until it reaches a creamy thickness.
Squeeze in lemon juice, warm the venison in the sauce, place it on a dish, and pour the sauce over it.

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.

Venison + red winetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together167 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,599 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Venison + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together957 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, butter, flour, sugar, red wine):

Plumfits better
Pearfits better
Vanillafits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, butter, flour, sugar, red wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.