Older recipes for braised meats start with soaking meat in cold water for a few hours, even overnight, changing out the water every 30 minutes. The reason for this step was to extract red "bloody" juices and game-y flavor from the meat. This may have been necessary a long time ago when meat might not have been as fresh or not quite as high in quality. However, these days, we're using fresher, higher quality meat so we don't need to soak the meat.