Skip to main content
Main

Venison

Venison cooked with wine and butter, then ground into a paste and stored in clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the venison

  1. Rub the venison all over with red wine.

  2. Season the venison with beaten mace, pepper, and salt.

  3. Place the venison in an earthen dish.

  4. Pour ½ cup of red wine and 1 pound of butter over the venison.

  5. If using a shoulder, cover it with a coarse paste.

Bake and shred

  1. Bake the covered venison in the oven overnight at 300°F (150°C).

  2. After baking, remove the meat from the bones.

Make and store the paste

  1. Beat the meat in a mortar with the fat from the gravy.

  2. If needed, add more seasoning and clarified butter.

  3. Continue beating until the mixture forms a fine paste.

  4. Press the paste into pots.

  5. Pour clarified butter over the paste.

  6. Store the paste in a dry place.

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. Red wine + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Red wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Provides the meat that is beaten into the paste, giving its main body and texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, keeping the paste smooth and helping preserve it under clarified butter.
Red wine
Adds acidity and flavour to the meat before and during the long bake.
Beaten mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the meat.

The step that matters

Beat until a fine paste forms. Beating the cooked meat with fat breaks its fibres down into a smooth, spreadable paste. Stopping early leaves a coarse texture, and the meat needs enough fat to bind it.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, red wine, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Roast VenisonRoast Venison20 recipesVenison PastyVenison Pasty7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes