Cut venison in very small pieces and stew, highly seasoned, until tender. Line a deep pie-dish with a rich pie-paste and bake. Then fill with the venison. Add a glass of port wine, a pinch of cloves and mace to the sauce and bits of butter rolled in flour. Pour the sauce over the venison and cover with the paste. Rub the top with a beaten egg and let bake until done.
A compressed set of directions that assumes you already know how to make a raised pie: the filling is fully cooked before it ever meets the pastry, and the final bake exists only to set and brown the lid. Read it as three operations — stew, blind-bake, assemble.
- The hinge: everything is cooked firstVenison shoulder or neck cut small needs 1.5 to 2 hours of gentle stewing to become tender, and no oven stage in this recipe is long enough to do that. If the meat is not fork-tender when it goes into the shell, the pie will be tough no matter how long you bake it.
- "A glass of port"In turn-of-the-century usage a wine glass is reckoned at roughly 2 fluid ounces; larger glasses and tumblers were reckoned bigger again, so the intended quantity is imprecise. For a pie built on about 2 lb of meat, 1/4 to 1/2 cup of port is the sensible range. Add it to the sauce and let it bubble a minute so the alcohol cooks off.
- Blind-baking the shell"Line a deep pie-dish with a rich pie-paste and bake" means bake it empty. Line, dock the base, weight it with beans or pie weights, and bake at 400F for about 20 minutes until dry and pale gold.
- "Bits of butter rolled in flour"This works much as beurre manié does: soft butter and flour combined, dropped into the simmering sauce in small pieces and whisked in. Reckon on about 2 tablespoons of flour with an equal weight of butter to thicken 2 cups of stock to a coating gravy, and let it simmer a few minutes to cook the flour out.
- Final bakeWith hot filling and a cooked base, the covered pie needs only 20 to 25 minutes at 400F to set the top crust and take colour from the egg wash. Cut a vent in the lid or the steam will lift it off the filling.
- "Highly seasoned"The recipe leaves this open; onion, a bay leaf, thyme, and sometimes a little vinegar or lemon in the stewing liquid are the usual companions to venison and would suit here. The cloves and mace go in at the end, a pinch of each, so they stay aromatic rather than turning medicinal.
- YieldA 9-inch deep dish built on about 2 lb of boneless venison serves six. It slices far better after 15 minutes' rest, and better still cold the next day, when the gelatine from the shoulder has set the gravy.
- If you cannot get venisonFarmed venison is lean and mild; wild is leaner still and may need a little added fat or bacon in the stew. Beef chuck or lamb shoulder behaves the same way in this construction, though the port and mace are pitched at game.
Venison pie of this kind belongs to a long British and French tradition of cooking game under a crust, where the pastry began as a container and preservative rather than something to eat — the meat's own juices set to a jelly beneath the lid and kept it for travel or the larder. By 1900 the pastry was firmly part of the dish, and the port, cloves and mace are the familiar nineteenth-century vocabulary for game: sweet fortified wine and warm spice to meet the strong, lean flesh of a wild animal. Its appearance in a book of dishes arranged one to a day, filed under "French" and dated late November, sits alongside the season when game was actually on the table. Blind-baking the shell and filling it with an already-finished stew is one long-established way of doing it, and a reliable one for meat that needs hours rather than minutes.