Skip to main content
Main

Venison

Venison slices simmered in a butter, flour, powdered sugar, red wine, and lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Venison and red wine work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Make gravy with the bones.

  2. In the pan, mix butter and flour until thick and brown.

Cook the venison

  1. Cut the venison into slices and fry until light brown.

  2. Keep the meat warm before the fire.

Finish and serve

  1. Add powdered sugar and red wine to the gravy, stirring until it thickens to the consistency of cream.

  2. Squeeze in the lemon juice and warm the meat in the sauce.

  3. Place the meat in a dish and pour the sauce over it.

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. Venison + red winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Venison + meattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together126 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 meat
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked by frying and then warmed in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and, with flour, browns to build the base of the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the wine and savory gravy.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce as it reduces and thickens.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy. Stirring the butter and flour until thick and brown cooks out the raw flour taste and builds color and flavor. Stirring also keeps the mixture smooth. Adding the wine and sugar too early or stirring too little can leave lumps or a pasty taste.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, meat, butter, flour, sugar, red wine):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, meat, butter, flour, sugar, red wine. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipes