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Saddle of Venison
Carve the same as a saddle of mutton. Serve some of the dish gravy with each portion. Venison and mutton soon become chilled, the fat particularly, thus losing much of their delicacy. Send them to the table very hot, on hot platters; carve quickly, and serve at once on warm plates.
Four sentences, and three of them are about temperature. The carving is borrowed wholesale from the saddle of mutton; the warning about the fat going cold is the part worth having.
- What a saddle isBoth loins still joined across the backbone, taken from the end of the ribs to the hips. It is a whole-animal cut and a special order. Venison now reaches most kitchens as a single boneless loin or as leg, and neither is carved the way this page describes.
- Carving itTwo schools, as with mutton: long slices taken down the length of each loin parallel with the backbone, or short slices taken across it. The long cut gives the handsomer slice, the short cut gives more of them, and either way the knife works outward from the spine and the slices are freed from the bone at the end.
- Heat is the whole instructionHot platter, hot plates, carve quickly, serve at once. The fat on venison and mutton is hard and sets the moment it cools, which is what the page means by losing its delicacy, and the meat is lean enough to lose its heat in the time it takes to make a speech.
- Dish gravyThe page wants some of the juices from the platter with every portion, and on a roast this lean that is not a nicety. Collect what runs out during the carving, keep it hot, and spoon it over each plate, because there is no other moisture in the meat.
- Degree of donenessThe page says nothing about it, because its reader took it for granted. A loin of venison taken past medium is dry, and nothing done at the table will repair it. The carving problem described here only arises on a roast that was stopped early and allowed to rest.
A book that teaches the carving of a whole saddle assumes a household to which a whole saddle arrives. That is the condition behind this page: venison of this kind moved mainly as a gift from an estate or a park rather than across a shop counter, so a family might face an entire saddle with no notice, no butcher’s preparation and no second chance, and the host would be expected to take it apart in front of the table. Hence a carving manual that pairs it with mutton and spends most of its few sentences on how fast the thing goes cold. The sequence of entries around it — saddle of mutton, saddle of venison, haunch of venison or mutton, calf’s head — is a list of joints that came into a house whole, in a period when that was still how meat chiefly arrived.