Skip to main content
Main

To Pot Venison

A method of cooking venison with vinegar, wine, port, butter, and spices, then crushing and pressing into pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Vinegar and red wine work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 575 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

To Pot Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. If the meat is stale, rub it with vinegar.

  2. Let the meat sit for an hour.

  3. Dry the meat with a cloth.

  4. Rub the meat all over with red wine.

  5. Season the meat with pepper, coarse sea salt, and mace.

  6. Place the meat in a dish.

  7. Pour ½ pint of port over the meat.

  8. Add 1 pound of butter.

  9. Send the dish to the oven.

Bake

  1. If using a shoulder, cover it with a coarse paste.

  2. Bake the shoulder overnight.

Make the paste and pot

  1. Once done, pick the meat from the bones.

  2. Beat the meat in a mortar with the fat from the gravy.

  3. If not seasoned enough, add more seasoning and clarified butter.

  4. Beat the mixture to a fine paste.

  5. Press the mixture into pots.

  6. Cover the pots as usual.

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. Vinegar + red winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Red wine + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Red wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Venison
Lean meat that forms the body of the dish once cooked and pounded into a paste.
Butter
Fat that keeps the cooked meat moist and rich, and helps bind the finished paste.
Port
Sweet, rich flavour that adds depth to the meat during its soak.
Red wine
Acidity and flavour that help season the surface of the meat before cooking.
Vinegar
Acid that helps freshen meat that is past its best before it is cooked.

The step that matters

Bake the shoulder overnight. Long, slow cooking softens the tough connective tissue in a shoulder, but the meat can dry out if it is not well covered and enriched with fat.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, vinegar, red wine, pepper, 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.

More venison pot recipes

Roast 3 See all 3 →

You might also like

Roast VenisonRoast Venison20 recipesVenison PastyVenison Pasty7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes