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Venison, to Dress

A roasted haunch of venison served with a mutton gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Venison, to Dress

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 the haunch

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

  2. Roast the haunch of venison for 3.5 hours if it is a buck, or 3.25 hours if it is a doe.

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

  4. Cover the haunch with a coarse paste on strong paper and tie it with fine pack thread.

  5. Place the haunch at a distance from the fire and baste it often.

Finish the roast

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

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

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For the 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 until it reaches 1 pint, seasoning only with salt.

  4. Serve the gravy in a boat alongside the venison.

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; long roasting turns its tough muscle tender and cooked through.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the surface brown and turn golden.
Flour
Dusted over the basting butter, it helps form a browned, frothy crust on the meat.
Old mutton
Simmered in water to make a rich, flavourful base for the gravy.

The step that matters

Basting the haunch often. Regular basting keeps the lean surface from drying out during the long roast and helps the exterior brown evenly.

“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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