Skip to main content
Main

Haunch of Venison

A roasted haunch of venison seasoned with butter, salt, and flour, served with gravy, currant jelly, and French beans.

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

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Haunch of Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the haunch of venison with a clean kitchen cloth.

  2. Spread a sheet of white paper with butter and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Make a paste of flour and water, about ½ inch thick, and cover the haunch with it.

Roast

  1. Roast the haunch for 3.5 to 4 hours, or 3.25 hours for a doe.

  2. Tie the paste on with packthread and hang it at a distance from a good fire, basting often.

  3. Fifteen minutes before serving, remove the paste and move the meat closer to the fire.

  4. Baste the meat well with butter and dredge with flour to create a frothy appearance.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with gravy sauce, currant-jelly sauce, and nicely-cooked French beans.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Venison + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together957 recipes

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

  3. Venison + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together667 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 haunch
Lean, dense meat that becomes tender and juicy with slow roasting.
Flour
Forms a protective paste that slows surface drying, then dredging gives a frothy, browned crust.
Butter
Adds fat for moisture and richness, and helps the surface brown while basting.

The step that matters

Removing the paste fifteen minutes before serving. The flour paste acts as a barrier that slows drying during the long roast. Removing it near the end and moving the meat closer to the fire lets the exposed surface brown and crisp instead of staying pale and soft.

“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

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