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To Stew a Shoulder of Venison

A slow‑cooked venison shoulder seasoned with salt, cayenne, mace, clove, and sugar, finished with port wine gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Stew a Shoulder of Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the venison

  1. Let the venison hang until tender, then bone and flatten it.

  2. Cover the meat with mutton fat and a mixture of salt, cayenne, mace, pounded clove, and sugar.

  3. Roll up the meat tightly and bind it with tape.

Stew and serve

  1. Place in a stewpan and cover with stock and port wine.

  2. Stew gently for 3 to 4 hours, depending on size.

  3. Remove the tape, strain the gravy, and mix with another glass of port wine.

  4. Pour the gravy over the meat and serve with currant jelly.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mutton + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Venison shoulder
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through long gentle stewing.
Mutton fat
Adds richness and moisture, basting the lean venison as it cooks.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and acidity to the stewing liquid and the finished gravy.
Stock
Provides the liquid that gently cooks the meat and forms the base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 3 to 4 hours. Venison is lean, so it needs long, low, gentle heat to break down connective tissue and become tender. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibres and dries the meat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, mutton, pepper, clove, sugar, beef, port wine):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, mutton, pepper, clove, sugar, beef, port 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.

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