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Roast Haunch of Venison
Wash in warm water and dry well with a cloth, butter a sheet of white paper and put over the fat, lay in a deep baking-dish with a very little boiling water, cover with a close-fitting lid or with a coarse paste one-half inch thick. If the latter is used, a thickness or two of coarse paper should be laid over the paste. Cook in a moderately hot oven for from three to four hours, according to the size of the haunch, and about twenty minutes before it is done quicken the fire, remove the paste and paper or dish-cover, dredge the joint with flour and baste well with butter until it is nicely frothed and of a delicate brown color; garnish the knuckle-bone with a frill of white paper, and serve with a gravy made from its own dripping, having first removed the fat. Have the dishes on which the venison is served and the plates very hot. Always serve with currant jelly.
A haunch is the whole hind leg, bone in — anywhere from 6 to 12 lb depending on the animal. The method is a covered slow roast finished with a blast of heat, and the only part that needs rethinking is the length of the cooking.
- The coarse pasteA flour-and-water dough, rolled to the half-inch the recipe specifies and draped over the joint, used as a disposable sealed lid rather than as pastry. It is not eaten. A close-fitting lid, or heavy foil crimped to the rim of the pan, does the same job.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures. "Moderately hot" is usually read as somewhere around 350–375°F, and the final "quicken the fire" stage as a short blast at the hottest setting, lasting only as long as it takes to brown and froth the surface.
- Time versus thermometerThree to four hours will take a modern farmed haunch far past palatable. Venison is extremely lean and has almost no intramuscular fat to protect it; cook to an internal temperature of 130–135°F at the thickest part of the leg, away from the bone, which on a 7–8 lb haunch is usually well under two hours at 375°F. Rest it 20 minutes before carving.
- Why the buttered paperThe paper over the fat cap, and the butter basting at the end, are both compensating for the same problem — a wild haunch carries very little fat and dries out fast. Barding the leg with sheets of pork fat or thin-cut bacon does more good than the paper does.
- "Nicely frothed"The flour dredge plus hot butter puffs into a thin blistered crust under high heat. It needs watching; the flour will scorch in a minute or two once it colours.
- The gravyPan drippings from a lean joint are scant. Deglaze with a little stock or red wine after skimming the fat, and expect a thin jus rather than a thickened gravy.
- Hot platesNot fussiness. Venison fat sets at a higher temperature than beef fat and turns tallowy on a cool plate.
- The paper frillA strip of paper cut into a fringe and wrapped round the exposed knuckle so the carver can grip the bone. Decorative and practical; skip it without loss.
- YieldA haunch of this size serves 10 to 14, with cold meat left over.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Minneapolis and Marysville, Ohio, in the 1870s and 80s, and its game chapter reflects a period when venison still reached ordinary midwestern tables through hunting and local markets rather than through farms — market hunting was legal, and deer, prairie chicken and wild turkey were sold commercially until state game laws tightened in the following decades. The technique here is imported wholesale from English cookery: the flour paste crust, the buttered paper, the frothing with flour and butter, the paper frill and the obligatory currant jelly all appear in English books on roast venison decades earlier, and the paste in particular is a survival from spit-roasting, where a sealed shell of dough kept a lean joint from drying over an open fire. The insistence on currant jelly is old and near-universal in Anglo-American practice; the sharp sweetness is generally explained as a foil to the strong, dry, close-grained meat.