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Venison Pasty

A savory pasty filled with stewed venison, onions, spices, and a buttery egg‑flour crust, served with a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Combine the venison pieces and bones with veal broth, Port wine, onions or shallots, pepper, salt, beaten spices, and lemon juice in a stewpan.

  2. Stew gently until the meat is three-quarters cooked.

  3. Transfer the meat to a deep dish with half of the cooking liquid and let it cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a paste by mixing flour, butter or beef marrow, and the beaten eggs with water and salt.

  2. Cover the meat with the paste and bake until the venison is tender.

  3. Strain and thicken the remaining cooking liquid, then pour it into the pasty three-quarters of an hour 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Venison + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Port wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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
Supplies the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing and baking.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that encloses the filling.
Butter or beef marrow
Adds fat to the paste, making it tender and rich.
Eggs
Bind the paste and help it set and brown during baking.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Pouring in the thickened liquid. Adding the strained, thickened liquid too early can make the pastry soggy, while adding it too late leaves the filling thin. Timing it about three-quarters of an hour before serving lets the sauce settle and stay rich.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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