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Venison, Potted

Venison cakes made with onion pulp, parsley, nutmeg, egg, and butter, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Venison, Potted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the peeled, sliced, and blanched onions in a mortar until reduced to a pulp.

  2. Place the onion pulp in muslin and press out the juice with the back of a wooden spoon.

  3. Remove all skin, fat, and gristle from the venison and chop it finely.

  4. Mix the chopped venison with the onion juice, parsley, and a pinch of nutmeg. Stir in the egg and season with salt and pepper.

  5. Form the mixture into flat cakes the size and shape of fillets and coat them lightly with flour.

Cook

  1. Heat the butter in a chafing dish and add the venison cakes.

  2. Fry gently for 10 minutes, turning them once.

  3. Cover the chafing dish and continue to cook gently for 5 minutes longer before serving.

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

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Venison
Forms the main body of the cakes and provides the meaty flavour and texture.
Egg
Binds the chopped meat so the cakes hold together during frying.
Butter
Conducts gentle heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the surface.
Onion juice
Adds moisture and a mild savoury sweetness to the meat.
Flour
Light coating that helps the outside of the cakes brown during frying.

The step that matters

Frying gently and turning once. Gentle heat lets the meat cook through without drying or toughening, and turning only once keeps the delicate cakes from breaking apart and their browned surface intact.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, egg, butter, flour, parsley, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, egg, butter, flour, parsley, nutmeg, 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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