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Venison Hashed

A dish of sliced venison cooked with butter, flour, shallots, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Flour and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,081 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Venison Hashed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the least done part of the venison into slices.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt a bit of fresh butter and mix in flour and chopped shallots over low heat for 10 minutes.

  2. Add ½ pint of port wine to the mixture and stir well.

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. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Shallot + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Flour
Thickens the butter and shallot mixture into a sauce base.
Fresh butter
Carries the shallots and flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Chopped shallots
Add aromatic sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.
Port wine
Adds sweetness, acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter and shallots. Cooking the flour over low heat for the full time lets its raw starch taste cook out and gives the sauce a smooth, properly thickened base. Rushing it leaves a floury taste and uneven thickness.

“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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