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Beef to Imitate Venison
Take three pounds of rump, sirloin, or buttock, without bone--the loin is best. Lay it in a pan and throw over it one glass of vinegar and a glass of port wine, having previously rubbed it with four ounces of sugar. Keep in a cool, dry place, and turn it often. In five or six days it will be ready; then make a raised crust, season with salt, cayenne, and mace, put some butter over the top of the cover, and bake four hours in a slow oven. Boil down the bones to make gravy, add a glass of port wine, strain, and pour boiling into the pie. Probable cost of meat, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for six persons.
A standing raised pie in which cheap beef is pickled in port, vinegar and sugar until it takes on the dark, slightly gamey character of venison. Almost everything depends on the five or six days before you touch an oven.
- The pickle is the whole pointRub the sugar in first, then add the liquids, and turn the meat at least twice a day so every face spends time submerged. Skimping the days gives you sweet-sour beef rather than anything resembling venison.
- Pickle in the refrigeratorA Victorian "cool, dry place" meant an unheated larder, cooler than a modern kitchen but variable and not reliably cold. There is no salt and not much acid here, so this mixture will not preserve anything; keep the pan covered at 40F or below and discard the meat if it turns slimy or sour-smelling.
- A glassA Victorian wineglassful is usually reckoned at somewhere between 2 and 4 fl oz, so a quarter to a half cup each of vinegar and port; the recipe does not define it. Use a red wine vinegar rather than distilled white, and a ruby port rather than anything dry.
- The cuts"Buttock" corresponds roughly to top round or rump; the "loin" the book prefers is presumably the sirloin end, though the recipe already lists sirloin separately. Ask for a solid, evenly shaped piece with no bone so it pickles uniformly, and get the bones from the butcher for the gravy as instructed.
- Raised crustThis means hot-water paste, moulded free-standing by hand and self-supporting, not a pie dish lined with shortcrust. It is deliberately stiff and thick; it functions as a baking vessel and was not always eaten.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275-325F. Four hours in that range suits a raised pie of this size: the crust must set and dry through without colouring too fast, and the meat inside is essentially braising in its own steam.
- The boiling gravyCut a vent hole in the lid before baking, and pour the strained, port-enriched stock in through it while both pie and gravy are still very hot. Cold stock poured into a hot pie will not distribute, and the gravy sets to a light jelly as the pie cools.
- ServingSix portions, as the original says. Raised pies of this kind were commonly eaten cold in slices, though the recipe itself does not specify how it was served.
Mock-venison recipes were a fixture of English cookery for well over a century, and they exist because venison was, for most households, hard to come by. Deer were park animals belonging to landowners, and a haunch arrived as a gift rather than a purchase; by the late-Victorian period venison could be bought from dealers, but the flavour was widely admired, and cooks had long learned to approximate it by hanging or pickling beef and mutton in wine, vinegar and sugar until the meat darkened and took on a faintly sweet, high taste. The raised crust here is the older English pie form, moulded by hand from hot-water paste and strong enough to travel, which is why it turns up so often in recipes meant to be eaten cold and in slices. Cassell's, compiling for late-Victorian middle-class kitchens, notes the cost of the beef at a shilling a pound, a reminder that the appeal was as much economic as culinary: the dish gave a table the prestige of game at the price of rump steak.