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Flesh-Fork
basting it well with butter or nice beef drippings mixed with a little flour. When nearly done skim the fat from the gravy and thicken to serve with the meat. The gravy may be seasoned with Worcester sauce, catsup or wine. XII. Preparing the Roast.
RIBS of beef may have the bones cut out, the meat rolled compactly together and properly skewered. A loin should have the spine properly cut for convenience in carving. Fowls should be properly skewered, and the roasting should be done with only water enough to properly baste. The roast should be covered with a buttered paper to prevent burning until such a time as it may be ready to finish by browning. With these directions any cook should be able to do a plain roast. XIII. Roast Saddle of Venison.
THE side which is to come uppermost at table should be placed next the pan in baking. When half done, turn it over in the pan, and cut into it in several places on each side of the bone, nearly three inches deep, and fill with a stuffing of bread crumbs highly seasoned with pepper and salt. Pour over the meat half a teacupful of catsup, covering equally. Stir into half a teacupful of black molasses a tablespoonful of whole allspice, and a teaspoonful of brown sugar. Spread this equally over the meat. Then crumble stale bread over all, keeping the meat well basted all the while. Bake slowly until finished, for it burns easily. When taken from the oven, garnish with bits of jelly, and serve.
XIV. Fowl and Turkey.
This is a run of numbered roasting notes from a longer chapter, so it opens mid-sentence and assumes a cook who already knows the basics. The venison saddle is the only fully worked recipe here, and its treatment is unusual enough to be worth following closely.
- Bake slowlyThe book gives no temperatures; "slowly" in period usage points to a slow oven, somewhere in the 250-300F range. The warning that the meat "burns easily" most likely concerns the molasses-and-sugar coating and the crumbled bread rather than the venison itself, since a sweetened crust at higher heat will blacken well before the interior is done.
- Doneness on venison"Until finished" gives the cook no guide, and period directions on game varied, some books calling for venison served rare. Saddle of venison is very lean and turns dry and livery past about 135F at the center; modern practice pulls it at 130-135F and rests it, and the deep cuts filled with stuffing make it easy to overshoot because they open the interior to the oven heat.
- TeacupfulA teacup in these books is usually reckoned at about 4 fluid ounces, though some run nearer 6, so "half a teacupful" is roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces, a quarter to a generous third of a cup. The original is genuinely imprecise; treat both the catsup and the molasses as roughly that much and adjust to coat the surface.
- Whole allspiceA tablespoon of whole berries stirred into molasses is a lot of hard spice to leave on a carving platter. Ground allspice, about a teaspoon, gives the same flavor without berries in the gravy; the original gives no instruction for removing them.
- Black molasses"Black molasses" in period usage generally meant a dark molasses, though the term was sometimes stretched to blackstrap. Dark, unsulfured molasses is the safer modern choice: blackstrap is noticeably more bitter and will read as scorched against the catsup.
- CatsupCatsup of this period was thinner, sharper with vinegar and more heavily spiced than modern tomato ketchup, and mushroom and walnut catsups were still in common use. Modern ketchup is sweeter, so go lighter on the added brown sugar.
- Buttered paperParchment is the modern stand-in for the buttered paper of the general roasting directions; foil works but traps steam and slows browning, so remove it earlier than you would parchment.
- Skewers and rolled ribs"Properly skewered" means trussed. For the boned and rolled rib, butcher's twine at 1 to 1 1/2 inch intervals holds the roll better than skewers and makes carving cleaner.
- YieldA saddle of venison means both loins left on the bone; the weight varies a great deal with the size of the animal, so judge servings by the piece you actually have. Carve in long slices parallel to the spine.
The chapter this comes from belongs to a period when a great deal of American venison still reached the table through hunting, informal barter or city game markets rather than a farm, and cookbooks accordingly treated it as a prestige roast rather than an everyday one: the saddle, both loins left on the backbone, was the show cut. The heavy sweet-spiced coating of catsup, molasses, brown sugar and allspice, finished with crumbled stale bread and garnished with jelly, is very much in the older Anglo-American tradition of pairing game with sweet and sour flavors, the same logic that put currant jelly beside venison and hare. The instruction to roast the presentation side face down and turn it halfway is a practical response to an uneven wood- or coal-fired oven, where the bottom of the pan took the strongest heat. The general roasting notes around it, with their buttered paper, water in the pan and drippings-and-flour basting, describe a technique that sits between true spit roasting and modern dry oven roasting.