Rub the venison with salt, pepper, vinegar, cloves and allspice; then put in a baking-pan. Pour over a cup of melted butter; add 1 onion sliced, some thyme, parsley, the juice of a lemon, and a cup of hot water. Let bake, covered, in a hot oven. Baste often with the sauce when nearly done. Sprinkle with flour; add a glass of sherry and let brown. Serve with celery and currant jelly.
A covered braise dressed up as a roast, written for a cook who already knew what a haunch of venison looked like. The recipe never states a weight, a cut, or a time, so the main work of modernising it is deciding which of two very different dishes you are making.
- Choose the cut firstCovered baking with liquid suits shoulder, neck or leg, which want 2.5-3 hours until the meat pulls apart. A loin or backstrap treated this way will be grey and dry; if that is what you have, roast it uncovered to an internal 130-135F and use the pan liquid as a sauce.
- "A hot oven"In period terms that is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-450F. For a covered braise, use it only for the first 20 minutes to get colour, then drop to 325F for the remainder. Held at 450F under a lid the sauce will boil away long before the meat is tender.
- Assume 3-4 lbThe quantities here — a cup of butter, a cup of water, one onion, one lemon — would suit a joint of roughly 3 to 4 lb, though the recipe names no weight or cut. Scale the liquid so it comes about an inch up the side of the pan.
- A cup of melted butterVenison is lean, and this is the period answer to that. A half cup is plenty with a modern lidded pan or Dutch oven; more than that and you will be skimming a slick of fat off the sauce before serving.
- A glass of sherryA wineglass in this era is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, though "a glass" is imprecise. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso rather than a cream sherry, which will push an already fruit-and-spice sauce into sweetness.
- The flour and the browningSprinkling dry flour over the meat and returning it to the oven uncovered is the thickening method here. It works, but the flour tastes raw unless it gets a good 15-20 minutes of heat. Whisking a beurre manié into the strained pan juices on the stovetop gives a cleaner sauce in less time.
- Whole spicesThe recipe does not say whether the cloves and allspice are whole or ground; "rub" points to ground, though whole spices scattered in the pan are a workable reading. Ground clove in the quantity you would use for a rub turns medicinal fast, so keep it sparing.
- ServingCurrant jelly with venison is not optional garnish but the acid-sweet counterweight to the spice; a tart redcurrant or lingonberry preserve does the same job. The recipe does not say how the celery is served — raw stalks and braised celery were both period accompaniments to game.
Venison in an American cookbook of this vintage sits awkwardly between wild game and luxury import: market hunting had collapsed the deer population across much of the eastern United States by the 1890s, and the state game laws and licence systems that eventually rebuilt it were only then being written. What the label "French" is doing here is signalling technique rather than provenance — the melted butter, the onion and herbs, the lemon, the wine finish and the flour liaison are the vocabulary of a braise in the French manner, applied to a meat that English and American cooks more often roasted plain before a fire. The pairing with currant jelly, by contrast, is thoroughly English and older still, part of a long tradition of serving sharp fruit conserves with dark meats that runs back through medieval verjuice and sour sauces. Books like this one, arranged as a dish a day with a different nation attached to each, sold the idea that a home cook could tour Europe from her own kitchen; the nationality on the page is often best read as a mood rather than a claim.