Name: Venison Steak
Ingredients: Venison steaks; Butter; Coarse sea salt; Black pepper; Claret wine; Currant jelly; Onions; Lemon slices

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 Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Heat a grill over a clear, hot fire.
Lightly butter the grill bars before placing the steaks on it.
Broil the steaks quickly, turning often to retain juices.
Have a warm platter ready with a piece of butter the size of an egg.
Dip the cooked steaks in the butter and season with salt and pepper.
Cover the steaks to keep them hot.
Heat a little claret and mix in a few spoonfuls of currant jelly.
Pour the claret mixture over the steak just before serving.
Optionally, fry the steaks like beef, omitting the wine, and serve with onions.
Serve with slices of lemon.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Venison + curranttop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together443 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,157 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the currant

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

Limefits better
Grapefits better
Orangefits better
Currantthe original

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