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Venison

Venison cooked in a sauce of butter, flour, powdered sugar, red wine, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Venison and red wine work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the venison into slices and make gravy from the bones.

  2. Fry the venison until nicely browned and keep it warm.

Make the sauce

  1. In the same pan, melt butter rolled in flour, stirring until thick and brown.

  2. Add powdered sugar, gravy from the bones, and red wine, stirring until it reaches the thickness of cream.

  3. Squeeze in lemon juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Warm the venison in the sauce.

  2. Serve with sauce poured over it.

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. Venison + red winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Venison + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together957 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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
Is the main protein, browned for flavour and then gently warmed in the sauce.
Butter
Melts with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness and browning.
Flour
Thickens the butter and gravy into a smooth sauce body.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the wine and lemon in the sauce.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour, and reduces with the gravy into the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that cuts the richness of the butter and wine.

The step that matters

Thickening the roux until brown. Cooking the butter and flour together until thick and brown builds the sauce's base and colour. Stopping too early leaves a pasty taste, while overcooking can scorch the flour and turn the sauce bitter.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, butter, flour, sugar, red wine):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, butter, flour, sugar, red wine. 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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