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Mock Venison

A mutton stew flavored with anchovies, onions, herbs, pepper, mace, and port wine, served with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mock Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Place the bones and skin of the mutton in a stew pan with anchovies, onions, sweet herbs, whole pepper, and mace.

  2. Stew the mixture well, breaking the mutton bones into several pieces.

  3. Strain the liquid into a clean stew pan and add the mutton, placing it fat side down.

Stew and serve

  1. Pour in the port wine and stew until the meat is tender.

  2. Brown the meat and serve with currant jelly sauce.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Port wine + curranttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton loin
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the stewing liquid.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury flavour to the stock.
Anchovies
Add a savoury depth to the stock that rounds out the meat flavour.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture well. Long, gentle stewing draws flavour and gelatin out of the bones and skin into the liquid, which gives the stock body. Rushing this step leaves a thin, weak base for the meat.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, thyme, parsley, pepper, mace, port wine):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, thyme, parsley, pepper, mace, port wine. 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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