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Venison, Fried
Cut the meat into slices, and make gravy of the bones. Fry the steaks of a light brown, and keep them hot before the fire. Put butter rolled in flour into the pan, and keep stirring it till thick and brown. Put in some finely-powdered sugar, the gravy made of the bones, and some red wine--let the sauce be the thickness of cream--squeeze in a lemon; warm the venison in it, put it in the dish, and pour the sauce over it. Omit the sugar if you choose, and send currant jelly to table with it in a glass.
A straightforward pan sauce built on the bones of the joint, in the sweet-sour style the Victorians liked with game. The one thing to watch is the reheating: venison steaks are lean and turn dry and livery if they sit in hot sauce.
- Warm, do not cook, in the sauce"Warm the venison in it" means a minute off the boil, just to coat and take the chill off. Fry the slices to rare or medium-rare (about 125-130F internal), rest them, then dip them through the finished sauce and plate immediately.
- The gravy of the bonesThis assumes you have broken up a saddle or haunch and can simmer the bones with an onion and a few peppercorns for an hour or two. A cup of good beef or game stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything heavily salted, since the sauce reduces.
- Butter rolled in flourEqual weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste - roughly 1 oz of each here. The recipe has you brown it in the pan, so it functions as a quick roux; keep stirring until it smells nutty rather than raw, about two minutes.
- "Light brown" steaksA hot pan, a film of fat, and roughly two minutes a side for slices half an inch thick. "Keep them hot before the fire" was a hearth instruction; the lowest setting of an oven, or a warmed plate loosely tented, does the same job.
- Thickness of creamThe target is pouring cream, not double cream - it should coat a spoon and run off. If it tightens too far, loosen with more stock or wine rather than water.
- Red wine and sugarAbout half a cup of a dry red. The "finely-powdered sugar" is caster sugar; a teaspoon is ample, and the recipe is right that it can be dropped altogether. Between the sugar, the lemon and the optional currant jelly there is a real risk of a sauce that tastes like dessert, so add the acid and the sweetness in stages and taste.
- Currant jelly at tableRedcurrant jelly, served in a small glass dish rather than stirred into the sauce, was standard with game through the nineteenth century. It is still the best foil for venison's iron-heavy flavour.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Reckon 6 oz of boneless venison per person; the sauce as scaled above serves four.
Fried venison of this kind belongs to the long English tradition of pairing game with sweetness and acid - sugar, wine and lemon here, and the near-obligatory currant jelly alongside. That combination descends from medieval and early modern sauces in which sugar and vinegar were ordinary savoury seasonings, and it survived at the British table chiefly with venison, hare and mutton long after it had disappeared from other meats. The instruction to keep the steaks hot "before the fire" and to build the sauce in the same frying pan reflects a kitchen where the range and the open hearth were both in use, and where nothing as useful as a bone was thrown away.