Skip to main content
Main

Venison Pasty

A pastry filled with cooked venison, seasoned with pepper, salt, nutmeg, sweet herbs, and butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Venison Pasty

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the raw venison from the bones and set aside the bones, skin, fat, and scraps for gravy.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the bones, shallot, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and sweet herbs with cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Cut the better pieces of venison into 1‑inch squares and cook in another saucepan until three‑quarters done.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a deep dish with puff pastry and add the squares of venison.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, and butter, then add ½ cup of the cooking liquid to prevent burning.

  3. Cover with a lid of puff pastry about 1‑inch thick, cutting a round hole in the center for steam to escape.

  4. Bake steadily until the pastry is golden brown.

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. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw venison
Forms the main filling, providing the meat that becomes tender during cooking.
Puff pastry
Forms the lining and lid, baking into a crisp, golden, layered crust.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing flavor and moisture to the filling.
Shallot
Adds mild aromatic sweetness to the stock made from the bones.

The step that matters

Adding the cooking liquid. Adding half a cup of cooking liquid to the meat before covering helps keep it moist and prevents scorching during baking, so the filling stays juicy rather than dry.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Shallotthe original
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Spinachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, nutmeg, 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 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes