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Venison Cutlets
Trim venison cutlets in usual way. Put 4 tablespoons Crisco in saute pan and when hot put in cutlets, seasoned with salt and pepper, fry till brown. Then take out cutlets, put into pan 1/2 tumbler currant jelly to melt, add 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 teaspoon salt, and serve separately with cutlets.
A two-pan-minute dish: sear the cutlets, then build a jelly sauce in the same pan. The only real difficulty is that venison loin is far leaner than the beef most cooks are used to, and the original gives no times.
- Don't fry it brown all the way throughVenison cutlets from the loin or leg are lean enough to turn dry and liver-flavoured past medium. Give them 2 to 3 minutes a side over fairly high heat for cutlets about 3/4 inch thick, pull them at 125-130F internal, and rest them while you make the sauce.
- "1/2 tumbler" of currant jellyA tumbler in period cookery is usually taken as a half-pint (8 oz) glass, which would make this roughly 1/2 cup of jelly, though tumbler sizes were not standardised. Jelly was commonly sold and stored in such glasses, and they were often pressed into service as rough measures.
- CriscoThis book was written to promote Crisco, then newly introduced, and hydrogenated shortening appears in nearly every recipe whether or not it suits the dish. Butter, clarified butter, or a neutral oil will all sear venison better and taste better with the jelly; the 2 tablespoons stirred into the sauce is essentially a fat enrichment, and butter does that job properly.
- Deglaze before the jellyThe instruction to melt the jelly in the pan is doing double duty as a deglaze. Scrape the browned fond up as the jelly loosens; a splash of red wine, port or stock first will thin it to sauce consistency rather than warm syrup.
- Salt in the sauceHalf a teaspoon of salt in half a cup of jelly is a lot, and correct in principle — the point is to pull the sauce away from dessert sweetness. Add it in stages and taste, since modern jellies vary in sugar.
- Serve separatelyThe original passes the sauce at the table rather than napping the meat, which keeps the crust on the cutlets. Follow it.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity of meat or number of servings. Four tablespoons of fat would suit a pan of four to six cutlets, which would serve about four, and roughly half a cup of jelly sauce should cover that number, but this is an estimate rather than anything the recipe states.
This comes from a Crisco-sponsored menu book of the 1910s. The pairing of venison with red currant jelly is much older than the book and is generally traced to English and Scottish game cookery, where a sharp fruit preserve — currant, rowan, quince — was a common accompaniment to lean roasted or fried game. What is new here is the fat: Crisco was launched in 1911 as a vegetable substitute for lard, and books like this one were commissioned to teach American cooks to reach for it by habit, in a jelly pan sauce as readily as in pastry.