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To Dress Venison

A roasted haunch of venison seasoned with butter, salt, and a paper paste, served with gravy and sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and beans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 511 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Dress Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the haunch

  1. Spread a sheet of white paper with butter and sprinkle it with coarse sea salt, then cover the fat of the haunch with it.

  2. Lay a coarse paste on strong paper, cover the haunch, and tie it with fine pack-thread.

Roast

  1. Roast the haunch of venison for 3.5 hours if buck, or 3.25 hours if doe, ensuring it is rather overdone than underdone.

  2. Position the haunch at a distance from a good fire and baste it often.

  3. Ten minutes before serving, remove the paste, move the meat closer to the fire, and baste it with butter and flour to froth it up.

Make the gravy

  1. For gravy, cut off the fat from the mutton and brown it on a gridiron for a few minutes.

  2. Place the browned mutton in a saucepan with 1 quart of water, cover, and simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Uncover and reduce the gravy to 1 pint, seasoning only with salt.

Make the sauces and serve

  1. Serve currant jelly in a boat.

  2. For pap-sauce, grate white bread and boil it with port wine, water, and cinnamon until smooth, then remove the cinnamon and add sugar.

  3. For jelly-sauce, beat currant jelly with 1-2 tablespoons of port wine and melt over the fire, adding more wine and sugar if needed.

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. Cinnamon + beanstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Currant + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Venison + muttontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 haunch
Long roasting under a fat and paste covering keeps the lean meat moist while it cooks.
Butter
Basting with butter and flour helps the outside froth and brown near the end.
Old mutton
Browned and simmered with water to build the body and flavour of the gravy.
Currant jelly
Its tartness and sweetness balance the rich, gamey meat in the sauces.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to both the pap-sauce and the jelly-sauce.

The step that matters

Roast until rather overdone. Venison is very lean, so the instruction to err toward overdone rather than underdone matters for tenderness; cooking by time alone can miss the true doneness of a haunch, so the meat should be checked as it roasts.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, butter, mutton, sugar, currant, port wine, cinnamon):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, butter, mutton, sugar, currant, port wine, cinnamon. 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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