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Gravy, to Make Mutton Like Venison
Let the mutton hang as long as it will keep sweet. The length of time will depend upon the weather. Cut a "high" snipe, or woodcock, into small pieces, being careful first to remove the bag from the entrails, and stew them gently in a pint and a half of unseasoned beef or mutton gravy. Strain, and pour it boiling hot over the mutton. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, variable. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
This is a finishing sauce meant to give a roast leg or haunch of mutton the flavour of venison, and it depends on two things no modern kitchen can reproduce safely: meat hung to the edge of spoilage and game birds deliberately allowed to go "high".
- "As long as it will keep sweet"The mutton is hung uncontrolled, at whatever temperature the weather happens to supply, until it is just short of stinking. A cool larder and frequent checking were the usual safeguards, but the margin was judged by nose alone. Dry-ageing today is done at a measured 1-3C with controlled humidity and airflow, and the instruction as written gives none of that.
- "High" snipe or woodcockA high bird is one hung until decomposition is well advanced. Bacterial growth at that stage can leave heat-stable toxins behind, so the half-hour simmer does not make the resulting gravy safe. This is the specific reason the recipe cannot be followed.
- The bag and the trailSnipe and woodcock were traditionally cooked undrawn, the intestines (the "trail") being prized. "The bag" is generally taken to mean the gizzard or stomach, removed because its contents turn the dish bitter. Cooking gut contents from a bird already held past soundness compounds the problem rather than solving it.
- Legal status of the birdsIn the United States woodcock and Wilson's snipe are migratory game birds under federal protection; they may be hunted in season by licensed hunters but not bought or sold. In Britain woodcock and snipe are subject to close seasons, though shot birds may be sold by game dealers within the permitted season.
- "Unseasoned gravy"Not a packet product but plain meat stock, reduced brown broth from beef or mutton bones with no salt, herbs or thickening, so that the flavour of the birds carries. A pint and a half is 30 fl oz in imperial measure, about 850 ml.
- "Probable cost, variable"Cassell's normally quotes a price per dish; the qualification here presumably reflects the unpredictable cost of the bird, which could not be priced like a butcher's joint.
- If you want the effectThe venison flavour Victorians chased came from controlled ageing and a gamey stock, and a current recipe worked out for modern refrigeration and inspected meat should be used instead.
Making mutton "eat like venison" was a standing preoccupation of English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, when venison was a gift of the deer park rather than a purchase and mutton was the everyday joint of the well-off table. Cooks approached the problem from both ends: long hanging to develop the sharp, faintly ferrous edge that distinguishes deer, and a sauce carrying the flavour of some other wild thing, here a woodcock or snipe hung past the point most eaters would tolerate on its own. Hannah Glasse printed a version of the trick, generally described as relying on claret or red wine and in some renderings blood; this one reaches for the game bird itself. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s for a large middle-class readership, kept such recipes partly as aspiration and partly as record, since the household that could lay hands on a spare snipe was not the household that needed a dictionary of cookery. It is also a reminder that Victorian palates found flavours in aged meat that later refrigeration, and later public health thinking, quietly removed from the table.