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Venison Steaks

Venison steaks cooked on a grill and served with butter, pepper, salt, currant jelly, and optional sherry or Madeira.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sherry work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Venison Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Grill

  1. Preheat the grill and grease it well with butter.

  2. Broil the venison steaks quickly.

Dress and serve

  1. Place the steaks on a heated dish.

  2. Pour melted butter over the steaks, adding pepper, salt, and currant jelly.

  3. Add a little sherry or Madeira wine to the dressing.

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. Currant + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Venison + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together443 recipes

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

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Venison steaks
The main lean meat, which stays tender when cooked briefly over high heat.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the grill surface brown and the steaks stay moist.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and acidity that balance the strong, gamey flavour of venison.

The step that matters

Broil the venison steaks quickly. Venison is very lean, so high heat for a short time browns the outside while keeping the inside juicy. Overcooking squeezes out moisture and leaves the meat dry and tough.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Red currantfits about as well
  2. Lemonfits about as well
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, butter, pepper, sherry. 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.

More venison steaks recipes

Broiled 8with Currant Sauce 6Grilled 3 See all 15 →

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