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Boiled Venison

A boiled venison dish served with cauliflower, cabbage, turnips, beetroot, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 336 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the venison

  1. Lay the venison in coarse sea salt for a week.

Cook

  1. Boil the venison in a cloth for 15 minutes per pound.

  2. Boil cauliflower, white cabbage, turnips, and beetroot in milk and water in a separate pot.

  3. Mash the turnips with cream and a little butter.

Serve

  1. Layer the cauliflower, mashed turnips, boiled cabbage, and beetroot in a serving dish as desired.

  2. Serve with melted butter on the side if desired.

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. Turnip + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cauliflower + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cauliflower + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cauliflower + cabbagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

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

  5. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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; salt curing firms its texture before boiling.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the mashed turnips.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavour in the mash and the side sauce.
Turnips
Becomes soft and mashable, giving a mild, slightly sweet base for the dish.

The step that matters

Boiling the venison. Boiling in a cloth at a steady simmer keeps the meat tender; a hard rolling boil toughens muscle fibres and dries the surface, so the time per pound must be judged carefully.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, milk, cauliflower, turnip, beetroot, cream, butter):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, milk, cauliflower, turnip, beetroot, cream, 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.

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