Venison Steak
Heat the gridiron over a clear, hot fire. Butter the bars before putting on the steaks. Broil rapidly, turning often in order to keep in the juices. Have a warm dish at hand, with a spoonful of butter melted to dip your steaks in when done; salt and pepper; cover to keep warm; then heat a little claret, add a few spoonfuls of currant jelly to it, and pour over steak just before serving. Fry steaks as you would beef, omitting the wine. the wine .
Use onions with it; serve with slices of lemon.
A short, confident set of directions that assumes a coal or wood fire and a hinged gridiron. The method translates well to a very hot grill or a heavy cast-iron pan, provided you respect the leanness of the meat.
- The hinge: cook it fast and rareVenison loin or leg steak carries almost no intramuscular fat, so it dries and turns liverish past medium-rare. Pull the steaks at 125-130F internal for a 1-inch cut, which on a fully preheated grill means roughly 3 minutes a side.
- "A clear, hot fire"This means the fire has burned down past flame and smoke to glowing coals with no soot. On gas, preheat on high for 10-15 minutes; in a pan, heat until a drop of water skitters and evaporates instantly.
- Turning oftenThe book's claim that frequent turning keeps in the juices is not how it works, but the practice is still sound: turning every 45 seconds or so gives more even cooking and less of a grey band under the crust.
- Buttering the barsButter burns and sticks at grilling heat. A neutral high-smoke-point oil wiped on with a cloth or paper towel does the job the recipe wants; save the butter for the warming dish.
- ClaretDry red Bordeaux, or any dry unoaked red. Heat about 1/4 cup with 2-3 tablespoons of red currant jelly and whisk until the jelly dissolves; the mixture should coat a spoon lightly, not be syrupy.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not blackcurrant preserve, and not jam. If you cannot find it, cranberry jelly is the nearest supermarket substitute, though it is sweeter and needs a squeeze of lemon.
- The onions and lemonThe last lines are compressed notes rather than steps. The recipe says only to 'use onions with it', leaving the treatment open; the lemon slices are a garnish and a foil to the sweet sauce. The duplicated 'the wine' looks like a text error, though whether it originates with the printer or with the transcription cannot be told from the page as given.
- Yield and restingFigure 6-8 oz of steak per person. Rest the meat 5 minutes in the warm buttered dish before the wine and jelly go over it, or the juices run out onto the plate.
Venison with a sweet-sharp fruit sauce is one of the oldest surviving pairings in English and American cookery, descended from the medieval habit of serving game with verjuice, vinegar and dried fruit, and eventually settling into what is often described as the familiar port-or-claret-and-currant-jelly form, though the date of that consolidation is uncertain. Recipes for game reflect a period when wild meat still moved through commercial markets: deer, grouse, canvasback duck and wild turkey were sold in city stalls and appeared on hotel menus. The market hunting that supplied them was largely shut down in the United States by the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, after which venison in the home kitchen became the property of hunters and, much later, of farmed-deer suppliers. The recipe's insistence on melted butter, a warmed dish and a covered rest is a practical response to the same problem cooks face today: lean game loses heat and moisture faster than beef, and the Victorian solution was to surround it with fat at every stage.