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To Roast Venison

A method for roasting a haunch of venison 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 Roast Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to a good heat.

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

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

Roast

  1. Place the haunch a distance from the fire and roast for 3.5 to 3.75 hours.

  2. Baste the meat often during roasting.

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

  4. Baste the meat with butter and a good amount of flour to create a frothy appearance.

Make the gravy

  1. For gravy, brown the fat from the mutton on a gridiron for a few minutes, then place it in a saucepan.

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
Is the main meat, cooked slowly at a distance from the heat to stay tender.
Flour
Basting with flour helps form a light, frothy crust on the surface of the meat.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, promoting browning and a richer surface on the meat.
Mutton fat
Browned on a gridiron and placed in a saucepan to form the base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Removing the paste and moving the meat closer to the fire. Doing this too early leaves the surface pale and soft; the final ten minutes of higher heat drive browning and set the crust.

“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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