Name: To Hash Venison
Ingredients: venison, thinly sliced; 1 cup port wine; 1 tablespoon browning sauce; 1 tablespoon ketchup; 1 onion, studded with cloves; ½ anchovy, chopped; slices of toast; currant jelly

Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Hash Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hash

In a stewpan, combine the venison slices, port wine, browning sauce, ketchup, onion, and chopped anchovy.
Bring the mixture to a boil.
Add the venison and heat thoroughly.

Serve

Place the toast in a soup dish in various shapes.
Pour the hash over the toast and serve with currant jelly.

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.

Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,099 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,057 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ketchup + anchovytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together479 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Port wine + curranttop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together356 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together239 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Venison: Is the main protein, cooked gently in the sauce until tender and heated through.
Port wine: Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce, deepening its flavour as it reduces.
Anchovy: Adds savoury depth to the sauce without a distinctly fishy taste.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, port wine, sauce, ketchup, onion, clove, anchovy):

Red currantfits better
Lemonfits better
Applefits about as well
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, port wine, sauce, ketchup, onion, clove, anchovy. 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.