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Venison

Venison cooked in a sweet red wine and lemon sauce made with butter, flour, powdered sugar, and gravy.

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.

  2. Make gravy from the bones.

Make the sauce

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

  2. Melt butter in the same pan.

  3. Stir in flour until thick and brown, being careful not to burn it.

  4. Stir in powdered sugar, the gravy from the bones, and red wine until it reaches the thickness of cream.

  5. Squeeze in lemon juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Warm the venison in the sauce.

  2. Serve it with the 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 meat, browned first for flavour and then gently warmed in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and helps flour brown in the pan for a deeper flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and, when browned, adds a nutty, roasted colour and flavour.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the sauce brown and balance its savoury notes.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour, and thins the sauce to a creamy consistency.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, sweet and savoury flavours of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in flour until thick and brown, being careful not to burn it.. Flour cooked in butter must brown evenly; if it scorches it turns bitter and dark, spoiling the sauce's flavour and colour.

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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