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Venison Paste

A venison stew finished with a butter and egg paste, baked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Venison Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the venison

  1. Bone the neck of venison and cut the meat into good-sized pieces.

  2. Put the meat and bones into a stew pan with veal broth, red port, onions or shallots, pepper, salt, beaten spices, and lemon juice.

  3. Stew gently until the meat is three-quarters done.

Assemble and bake

  1. Transfer the meat to a deep dish with half of the cooking liquid.

  2. When nearly cool, cover and garnish with a paste made from flour, butter or beef marrow, beaten eggs mixed with water, and salt.

  3. Bake the venison until tender.

Finish with gravy

  1. Three-quarters of an hour before serving, strain and thicken the remaining cooking liquid and add it to the pasty.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Venison + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together159 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Venison neck
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing and baking.
Veal broth
Forms the moist cooking liquid that tenderises the meat and later becomes the gravy.
Red port
Adds depth and a touch of sweetness to the cooking liquid.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that encloses the meat.
Butter or beef marrow
Adds richness and fat to the paste, giving it tenderness and flavour.
Eggs
Bind and enrich the paste and help it brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Stewing until three-quarters done. Stopping before the meat is fully cooked leaves it tender after baking. Over-stewing dries the fibres and makes the meat stringy once it returns to the oven.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, veal, pepper, lemon, flour, butter, egg. 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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