Season venison steaks with salt, pepper and lemon-juice. Put in a saucepan with 2 tablespoonfuls of hot butter. Add 1 onion, 2 bay-leaves, 1 clove of garlic and a sprig of parsley minced fine. Let brown; then add ½ can of mushrooms, some thyme chopped fine and a glass of claret. Cover and let simmer until tender. Serve with toasted croutons and currant jelly.
A short braise built on the standard French flavour base of onion, bay, garlic and parsley, finished with red wine. The one decision that governs the result is which cut of venison you use.
- Cut first, method second"Simmer until tender" only works with shoulder, neck or leg meat, which needs 1½ to 2 hours covered to break down. Loin or backstrap steaks are lean and nearly collagen-free; simmering them turns them grey and dry in fifteen minutes. If you have loin, sear it hard, pull it at 130F internal, and make the sauce separately.
- A glass of claretClaret is the old English term for red Bordeaux. Period cookbooks are inconsistent about a "glass": a wineglassful is commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though a "glass" of wine may mean more. Something in the range of ½ cup of a dry, moderately tannic red is a reasonable reading.
- Half a can of mushroomsCanned mushrooms were widely available and commonly used in American kitchens by 1900. Can sizes varied, so half a can is only a rough measure -- a few ounces drained. Fresh cremini, browned separately and added in the last twenty minutes, give far more flavour.
- The aromatics get minced togetherThe onion, garlic and parsley go in minced fine so they dissolve into the sauce rather than sitting in it; the thyme is also chopped fine but added later, with the mushrooms. The bay leaves stay whole and should be fished out before serving.
- Let brown means brownTwo tablespoons of butter over moderate-high heat, and don't crowd the pan. The fond from the meat and onion is most of the sauce's colour and depth; deglaze with the claret and scrape it up.
- CroutonsHere these are slices or triangles of bread toasted or fried in butter, not the small cubes sold for salads. They go under or around the meat to take up the sauce.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly is the traditional accompaniment to game in both French and English cooking. A spoonful stirred into the finished sauce also rounds off venison's leanness if the wine has gone sharp.
- YieldNot stated. The sauce quantity would suit roughly 1½ to 2 lb of meat, which with the croutons would serve about four.
Venison in an American cookbook of this period was often wild-shot rather than bought, and deer seasons in many places ran into the late autumn and winter, though they varied from state to state. The treatment here is straightforwardly French provincial: butter, onion, bay, garlic, thyme and red wine, the same base that carries beef bourguignon and civet de li"vre, with the canned mushrooms marking it as a turn-of-the-century American kitchen rather than a French one. Serving game with red currant jelly is a long-standing convention in both French and English cooking, generally explained as a sweet-tart counterweight to lean, strongly flavoured meat; the pairing was already old enough by 1900 that this book simply names it without comment.