Home › The Principles of Cookery › Roebuck, Haunch of, Marinaded
Roebuck, Haunch of, Marinaded
Prepare a marinade sufficiently deep to cover the surface of the haunch, the ingredients being in the following proportions. With a pint of vinegar put a quart of water, two onions finely minced, four cloves, a blade of mace, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, a little salt, a sliced carrot, three or four sticks of celery, and a bunch of sweet herbs. Boil all together for half an hour, strain, and put into a pan large enough to hold the roebuck. Saw the shank and spine bones from the haunch, pare away the skin from the upper part of the leg and along the loin, and lard these bare places closely and evenly with thin strips of bacon. Put the haunch in the marinade for a week. Take it up, spit, and roast before a clear fire, being careful to baste constantly. Unless this is done the meat will be very dry. Take it up, brush it over with melted glaze, and serve very hot. The dish should be garnished with stewed prunes and fried potatoes, and a sauce, prepared as follows, should accompany it, a little poured over the haunch, and the rest in a tureen. Cut an ounce of lean ham into dice, and fry them in a little butter with a small carrot, a stick of celery, and an onion, all cut small, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, a quarter of a blade of mace, and a pinch of powdered thyme. Stir these ingredients over the fire until they are lightly browned, then add two table-spoonfuls of vinegar and one of ketchup. Let the liquor boil, and put with it half a pint of brown sauce, a tea-spoonful of Bovril, a wine-glassful of sherry, and a tea-spoonful of anchovy. Let the sauce boil carefully, skim off the fat, etc., strain it, and it will be ready for use. Time to roast the haunch, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. to 2s. a pound. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A late-Victorian treatment for lean roe deer: a cooked vinegar marinade, close larding, spit-roasting, and a sharp brown sauce. Most of the work of translating it lies in the marinating, the fire, and a handful of ingredients that no longer sit on the shelf.
- The week in the marinadeThis assumes a cold game larder in winter, not a warm kitchen. If you attempt anything like it, the meat must be fully submerged and held under refrigeration throughout, and two to four days is ample for a modern farmed haunch; a week of acid will leave the outer inch mealy rather than merely tender.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz and the quart 40 fl oz, so the marinade is roughly 2.5 cups vinegar to 5 cups water. The half pint of brown sauce in the sauce is about 1.25 cups, and a wine-glassful of sherry is 2 to 2.5 fl oz.
- Larding, and whyRoe venison carries almost no intramuscular fat, which is the whole reason for threading strips of bacon through the bared surfaces. A larding needle is still the correct tool; barding, tying sheets of fatback or streaky bacon over the joint, achieves much the same and is far quicker.
- Fire to oven"A clear fire" means a bright, smokeless bed with the spit set close. In an oven, sear at 450F for 15 minutes and drop to 325F, and judge by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock: 125-130F at the thickest point for rare to medium-rare. The recipe gives no weight; an hour and a half would suit a haunch of roughly 5 to 6 lb.
- Do not overcook itThis is the hinge of the dish. The constant basting the recipe insists on is a response to the same problem an oven solves differently; past about 140F internal, lean venison turns grey and dry and no amount of basting or glaze recovers it. Rest the joint 20 minutes before carving.
- GlazeMeat glaze is stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold, melted and brushed on for shine. Reduced veal or game stock, or a commercial demi-glace loosened over heat, does the job.
- Bovril and anchovyBovril is a concentrated beef extract, still sold; a teaspoon of it, or of any beef bouillon paste, is what is wanted. A teaspoon of "anchovy" means anchovy essence, for which anchovy paste or one mashed fillet substitutes directly. "Ketchup" here is more likely mushroom or walnut ketchup than the tomato kind.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or a good roux-thickened brown stock, not bottled table sauce. If you are not making one, use a jarred demi-glace and skip the mace, which will otherwise dominate.
- ServingEight to ten as written. Prunes appear with venison in period and continental cookery, so the garnish is not an eccentricity; redcurrant or rowan jelly serves the same sweet-sour purpose if prunes seem a step too far.
The roebuck is the male roe deer, a small European deer weighing a fraction of a red deer, and its haunch came chiefly from the game larder, though this entry's costing at 1s. 4d. to 2s. a pound shows it could also be bought. The cooked vinegar marinade here, boiled with root vegetables and whole spice, closely resembles the German and Austrian Beize used for Rehbraten, and the prunes garnishing the dish may point the same way; Cassell's, compiled for the ambitious late-Victorian household, set continental habits beside plainer English roasts. The long steeping had a practical origin: wild venison arrived tough, variably aged, and sometimes strong, and acid both tenderised and tempered the flavour. The Bovril in the sauce places the entry after 1886, when that brand name came into use.