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Venison Potted

Venison is cooked with red wine and butter, then seasoned and returned to the oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and red wine work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Venison Potted

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the venison

  1. Place the venison in a pan and pour red wine over it.

  2. Cover the meat with 1 pound of butter and seal the pan with a pastry lid.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until done.

Prepare the mixture

  1. Remove the meat from the gravy.

  2. Beat the meat with the butter that has risen to the top, adding more if necessary.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and pounded mace.

Pot and set

  1. Transfer the mixture into pots.

  2. Return the pots to the oven for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the pots from the oven.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. Cover with clarified butter.

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 + red winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Red wine + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Red wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Main meat that becomes tender and shreddable after slow baking in liquid and fat.
Red wine
Adds moisture and savory depth to the meat as it cooks.
Butter
Provides richness and moisture, and binds the beaten meat into a spreadable texture.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the finished potted meat.

The step that matters

Bake in the oven until done. Venison is lean and its connective tissue needs slow, moist heat to break down. Cooking until the meat is fully tender lets it pull apart easily when beaten, while overcooking leaves it dry and stringy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, red wine, butter, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, red wine, butter, pepper. 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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