Name: To Stew a Breast of Venison and Peas
Ingredients: 2 pounds venison, cut into pieces; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); ½ cup mutton broth; 3 pints green peas or French beans, cut small

Why it works: Venison and mutton work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 279 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Stew a Breast of Venison and Peas

Ingredients

2 pounds venison, cut into pieces
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
½ cup mutton broth
3 pints green peas or French beans, cut small

Directions

Prepare

Season the venison pieces with black pepper and coarse sea salt.
Fry the venison in a pan until browned.

Stew and serve

Transfer the venison to a stewpan and add mutton broth and green peas or French beans.
Stew all ingredients together until tender.
Skim off excess fat and serve hot.

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 + muttontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together279 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + peastop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,331 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mutton + peastop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together598 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Pepper + muttontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together37 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: Forms the main body of the stew, becoming tender with slow simmering.
Green peas or french beans: Add bulk, sweetness and fresh vegetable texture to the stew.
Mutton broth: Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the venison until browned. Browning creates savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction on the meat surface. Pale meat added to the stew gives a flatter, less rich taste.

“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.

Mutton Broth292 recipes

Green Peas229 recipes

Haricot Mutton59 recipes

Mutton Soup56 recipes

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To Stew a Breast of Venison and Peas