Venison Pie
Cut the meat into small pieces; put them into a stewpan with one onion; add salt, pepper and nutmeg, and just enough cold water to cook until tender Have ready a good pie crust; roll and line a deep pie plate with this and fill with the meat; before putting this in the pie crust roll some flakes of butter in flour and put over the pie; cover with a thick layer of pastry, and make a hole in the center of the top crust; bake slowly. Heat some port wine, into which you have thrown some cloves and mace. When the pie is nearly done, pour this mixture into the pie through the hole of the top crust; brush the top with beaten egg; return to the oven and bake a light brown.
A two-stage pie: the venison is stewed to tenderness first, then baked in pastry with hot spiced port poured in through the vent near the end. Nothing here is dangerous, but several quantities are left entirely to the cook.
- The hingeThe meat must be fully tender before it ever touches the pastry. Venison is lean and collagen-heavy; the oven stage is only long enough to cook the crust, so any toughness left in the stewpan stays in the finished pie.
- Stewing timeShoulder or neck cut into 1-inch pieces needs roughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer. Loin or a tender haunch steak needs far less and is largely wasted here; save it for roasting.
- "Just enough cold water"Barely cover the meat. You want a small amount of concentrated liquid, since a wet filling will make the bottom crust sodden. If it looks thin when the meat is done, reduce it before filling the pie.
- Oven temperature"Bake slowly" points to a moderate oven; around 325F is a reasonable modern reading, though no temperature is given. The final browning after the port goes in can be done hotter for the last ten minutes or so, which is what "bake a light brown" describes.
- Quantities not givenNo amount is specified for meat, butter, flour or port. For a deep 9-inch plate, reckon on about 2 lb of trimmed venison, 2 tablespoons of butter tossed in a tablespoon of flour, and 1/3 to 1/2 cup of port with 3 cloves and a blade of mace.
- Reading the butter instructionThe clause sits awkwardly, but the sense is that the floured butter flakes go over the meat inside the pie, before the top crust is laid on, where they will help enrich and slightly thicken the juices.
- The ventCut the hole in the top crust before baking and keep it open with a small roll of foil or a pie funnel, otherwise the pastry seals over and there is nowhere to pour the wine.
- Egg wash timingBecause the glaze goes on only in the final minutes, the crust will be pale until then. Brush it after the port is added, as directed, and give it just long enough to colour.
- YieldA deep 9-inch pie of this kind serves six, with a green vegetable or a sharp jelly alongside.
Venison pie under a raised or covered crust belongs to a long tradition of English meat cookery, and the spicing here — nutmeg, cloves, mace and fortified wine — preserves an earlier taste for sweet-warm spice with dark meat that had largely faded from beef and mutton cookery. Cookbooks often kept game in its own chapter, and one likely reason is practical: venison arrived from a hunter or a game dealer rather than a butcher, in unpredictable cuts and ages, which may be why the instruction is to stew until tender rather than for a stated time. Pouring hot spiced wine in through the vent appears to be a version of the older practice of finishing a pie with a poured-in liquor after baking, when the crust had set and the filling had shrunk enough to take it.