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A Venison Steak

A simple venison steak seasoned with pepper, sea salt, and butter, served with optional gravy, wine, or jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

A Venison Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the steaks

  1. Cut steaks from the leg, ½ inch thick.

  2. Broil the steaks for about five minutes.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and butter.

Make the sauce

  1. If using, pour hot roast venison gravy over the steaks.

  2. Combine red wine and currant jelly in a saucepan.

  3. Thicken with flour and butter, then boil.

  4. Pour over the steak.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Venison + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Red wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together113 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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
The lean main cut, whose surface browns under the broiler's high heat.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce as it reduces.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the wine.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, binding the liquid into a coating.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor across the meat and sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour and butter, then boil. The flour must be fully blended and boiled so it thickens smoothly and loses its raw, starchy taste. Stopping early leaves the sauce lumpy or thin.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, pepper, butter, red wine, flour):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, butter, red wine, 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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