Name: Mock Venison Pasty
Ingredients: pepper; salt; butter; venison; fine old mutton; ½ pint cold gravy; puff paste

Why it works: Venison and mutton work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 279 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mock Venison Pasty

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

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Lay pepper and salt at the bottom of a dish and add some butter.
Pack the venison nicely in the dish.

Make the gravy

Boil venison bones with fine old mutton to make gravy.
Pour ½ pint of cold gravy into the dish.

Assemble and bake

Cover the venison with butter and line the sides of the dish with puff pastry, leaving the bottom clear.
Bake until done.
Pour hot gravy into the middle using a funnel and shake to mix.

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.

Venison + muttontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together279 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + venisontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together957 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + muttontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,442 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,781 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Venison: Forms the main meat filling, providing the dish's rich, gamey flavour.
Puff paste: Forms a light, flaky crust that holds the filling in the dish.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping keep the meat moist and flavourful.
Fine old mutton: Adds meaty flavour and body to the gravy.

“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.