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Venison Roast

A roasted haunch of venison seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and served with a spiced gravy and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Venison Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the haunch with coarse sea salt and black pepper, then cover it with butter.

  2. Place very little hot water in the roasting pan and lay the chopped onion underneath the haunch.

Roast

  1. Keep the fire hot while roasting, basting often.

  2. Roast for about 20 minutes per pound.

  3. When nearly done, add the claret and more butter, then baste with this mixture.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Once done, strain the gravy and thicken it with flour.

  2. Spice the gravy with cloves and mace, and serve with currant jelly.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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 haunch
Is the main cut of meat that makes up the whole roast.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the surface moist and helps it brown while roasting.
Claret
Adds moisture and acidity to the basting liquid and flavours the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the meat.
Onion
Sits under the haunch in the pan, adding aroma and flavour to the drippings for the gravy.

The step that matters

Keep the fire hot and baste often. A hot oven browns the outside and seals in juices, while regular basting keeps the surface from drying out during a long roast of lean meat.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, pepper, butter, onion, flour, clove, mace):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, butter, onion, flour, clove, mace. 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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