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To Dress Venison

A roasted haunch of venison seasoned with butter, salt, flour, and mutton fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and mutton work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 279 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Dress Venison

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Spread a sheet of white paper with butter and place it over the fat of the venison, sprinkling it with a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Cover the haunch with a coarse paste on strong paper and tie it with fine string.

Roast and finish

  1. Place the venison at a distance from the fire and roast for 3.5 to 3.75 hours, basting it often during roasting.

  2. Ten minutes before serving, remove the paste, move the meat closer to the fire, and baste it with butter and flour to create a frothy appearance.

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

  5. 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
The main cut of meat, which gives the roast its body and flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the surface brown and froth when basted.
Flour
Mixed with butter for basting, helping the surface form a light, frothy coating.
Old mutton fat
Its rendered fat is used for the gravy, adding savoury richness.

The step that matters

Remove the paste and baste at the end. Timing matters here: moving the meat closer to the fire for the last ten minutes browns and froths the surface, but leaving it too long can dry or scorch the exterior.

“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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