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A Nice Pie From Cold Venison

A puff pastry‑covered venison pie with gravy, port wine, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Nice Pie From Cold Venison

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Season the venison with nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line the sides and edges of a dish with puff pastry.

  2. Place the seasoned venison in the dish.

  3. Add the gravy, port wine, and lemon juice.

  4. Cover the dish with more puff pastry.

  5. Bake until golden brown.

  6. Pour additional gravy into the pie after removing it from the oven.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together239 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + port winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together462 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 lean texture becomes tender during the long, moist cooking.
Puff pastry
Forms the crisp, flaky crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.
Rich gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth so the filling stays juicy rather than dry.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity depth that balances the rich, gamey flavour of the meat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavours and helps balance the sweetness of the port.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, port wine, lemon. 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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