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Venison Pasty

A savory pasty filled with stewed venison, onions, spices, and a buttery paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Venison Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Stew the venison

  1. Cut the venison into good-sized pieces and place them with the bones in a stewpan.

  2. Add veal broth, Port wine, chopped onions or shallots, pepper, coarse sea salt, beaten spices, and lemon juice.

  3. Let the mixture stew gently until the meat is three-quarters done.

  4. Transfer the meat to a deep dish with half of the cooking liquid.

  5. Let the meat cool.

Make the paste and bake

  1. Prepare a paste with flour, butter or beef marrow, and beaten eggs mixed with water and salt.

  2. Cover the meat with the paste.

  3. Garnish the meat with the paste.

  4. Bake the pasty at 350°F (175°C) until the venison is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain and thicken the remaining cooking liquid.

  2. Pour the strained liquid into the pasty three-quarters of an hour before serving.

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

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

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Port wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Flour and butter 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
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow stewing and baking.
Veal broth
Forms the moist cooking liquid that flavours the meat and later becomes the sauce.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the cooking liquid.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that encloses the meat.
Butter or beef marrow
Adds fat to the paste, giving it richness and a tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the paste and add richness and structure as it bakes.

The step that matters

Let the meat cool before covering it with paste. Placing paste over hot meat can soften and melt the fat in the dough, making it greasy and fragile. Cooling the meat first keeps the paste firm so it bakes into a crisp, intact crust.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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