Name: Venison Pasty
Ingredients: best parts of venison, cut into small squares; water; rich puff pastry; ½ cup gravy; butter; salt; pepper

Why it works: Venison and butter work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 957 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Venison Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the best parts of venison in a saucepan with as little water as possible until not quite done.
In another saucepan, stew the poorer bits of meat.
Prepare a rich puff pastry and line the sides of a dish.
Add the best parts of venison to the dish with ½ cup of gravy.
Season with butter, salt, and pepper, then bake in the oven.

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.

Venison + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together957 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Venison + peppertop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together955 recipes

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