Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Spiced Venison
Spiced Venison
Rub a piece of venison with salt, pepper, vinegar, cloves, and allspice; then put into baking pan. Pour over 1 cup melted Crisco, add 2 sliced onions, sprig of thyme, 3 sprigs parsley, juice 1 lemon, and 1/2 pint hot water. Cover and bake in hot oven till tender. Sprinkle with flour, add 1 glassful of sherry wine and allow to brown.
A covered braise dressed up as a roast. The whole method hinges on keeping the pan sealed until the meat is tender, then finishing uncovered so the flour and sherry glaze the outside.
- Cut and weightNo size is given; the method would suit something like a 3-4 lb shoulder, neck or haunch of venison, bone in or out. A cup of fat and a cup of water is a plausible amount for that range, feeding perhaps four to six.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period that usually means somewhere around 400-450F. For a covered braise of this length, start there for the first twenty minutes and then drop to about 325F, or the liquid will boil away long before the connective tissue gives up.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it, which is why a cup of shortening appears where an older cook would have used pork fat or butter. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works, and lard or beef dripping suits venison better than shortening does.
- 1/2 pint hot waterOne cup. Check the pan once or twice during cooking and top up if it goes dry; the water is there to make steam, not gravy.
- A glassful of sherryAn old wine glass, roughly 1/4 to 1/2 cup. Add it after the flour and leave the lid off so it reduces rather than steaming the crust away.
- The spice rubQuantities are left to the cook. Whole cloves and allspice are harsh in quantity on game; a teaspoon of each, crushed, with a tablespoon of vinegar is enough for a 4 lb piece.
- Doneness"Till tender" means fork-tender, two to three hours for a working cut. Venison braised this way is not cooked to a temperature but to a texture; a lean loin would be ruined by it and should be roasted rare instead.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble published after Crisco went on sale in 1911, written by Marion Harris Neil to show American housekeepers what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable shortening in place of the lard and butter they knew. That commercial purpose helps explain the cup of melted Crisco poured over a piece of game, a dish more usually cooked in its own or in pork fat. The spicing itself is older: cloves, allspice, vinegar and wine were common in English and colonial treatments of venison, and are often said to have suited meat that might be several days old, though this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. The sherry at the finish recalls the potted and spiced venison of eighteenth-century tables, where the meat was cooked down hard, sealed under fat and kept for weeks.