Name: Venison Steak
Ingredients: venison steak; coarse sea salt; black pepper; butter

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 Steak

Ingredients

venison steak
coarse sea salt
black pepper
butter

Directions

Wash the venison steak and place it in a frying pan.
Cover the pan tightly and let it steam in its own juices until cooked through.
Sprinkle salt, pepper, and pieces of butter over the steak.
Keep it covered in a serving dish until ready to serve.

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).
Pepper + buttertop 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Venison steak: Is the main protein that cooks through by steaming in its own juices.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the surface of the steak as it sits.

“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.