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Broiled Venison Steak
Broil quickly over a clear fire, and when sufficiently done pour over two tablespoonfuls of currant jelly melted with a piece of butter. Pepper and salt to season. Eat while hot, on hot plates.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know venison. The whole method rests on high heat and short contact, because a venison steak has almost no intramuscular fat to protect it.
- "A clear fire"This means coals burned down past flame, with no smoke and no flare-up — the period equivalent of a hot grill or a ripping-hot cast-iron pan. Get the surface hot enough that the steak sizzles the instant it lands; there is no fat to render slowly.
- Cut and thicknessUse loin or leg steaks about 1 inch thick. Anything thinner cooks through before it colours, which defeats the point of broiling quickly.
- "Sufficiently done" is rarer than you thinkVenison is best pulled at 125-130F for medium-rare and rested five minutes. Past about 140F the lean muscle tightens and goes livery and dry, and no amount of jelly rescues it.
- The currant jelly sauceTwo tablespoons red currant jelly melted with roughly a tablespoon of butter, warmed gently so it emulsifies rather than splits. Redcurrant jelly is still sold; tart red plum or lingonberry preserve behaves the same way. Season the meat, not the jelly.
- Season after searingThe recipe mentions pepper and salt after the sauce, though the order may be no more than the sequence of the writing; salt laid on last does stay perceptible on the surface. A light dry-salting an hour ahead also works if you prefer.
- Hot plates are not a flourishVenison fat and connective tissue set quickly as the meat cools, and the jelly sauce stiffens on a cold plate. Warm the plates in a low oven.
- Farmed versus wildSupermarket venison is farmed, milder and more tender than the wild deer this book assumes. Wild meat from an older animal benefits from a day or two in the refrigerator before cooking; the method itself does not change.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two tablespoonfuls of jelly would sauce roughly two steaks.
Serving venison with currant jelly is one of the most durable pairings in English and American cookery, and it was standard enough that a book could invoke it in a single clause without explanation. The logic is old: sweet-sharp fruit conserves — currant, quince, barberry, later cranberry — were the customary foil for lean, strong-tasting game, and they did double duty in an era when hung meat was often assertive. Turn-of-the-century household books seem to have assumed that a family might receive venison, wild duck or quail from a hunting relative or a market game stall, and they tend to treat deer as an ordinary if occasional supper rather than the specialty purchase it became after game laws and commercial hunting bans reshaped the American meat trade in the early twentieth century.