Home › The Principles of Cookery › VENISON PASTY (another way) (Modern pasty is made)
VENISON PASTY (another way) (Modern pasty is made)
A modern pasty is made of the parts that do not roast well, as the neck, the breast, or shoulder. The breast makes a good pasty. Cut it into little chops, trimming off the bones and skin; make some good gravy from the bones and other trimmings; place fat and lean pieces of the meat together, or, if very lean, place thin slices from the firm fat of a leg or a neck of mutton along with each piece of venison; season the meat with black pepper; salt, pounded mace, and allspice; place it handsomely in a dish, and put in the drawn gravy, a quarter of a pint of claret or port, a wine-glassful of shallot vinegar, and, if liked, a couple of onions very finely shred. Cover the dish with a thick crust. Before serving the pasty, if the meat is lean, more sauce, made of a little wine, gravy, mixed spice, and the juice of a lemon may be put in hot. An hour and a half in a moderate oven is quite sufficient for baking an ordinary-sized pasty; an hour will do for a small one. Some cooks marinade the meat in the wine and other seasonings for a night, or for some hours previous to baking. This no doubt imbues the venison with the flavour of the seasonings, but at the same time draws off the juices and hurts the natural flavour of the meat.
A deep-dish venison pie in all but name, built from the cuts a Victorian cook could not roast. The lean cuts, not the pastry, decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: cook the meat, not just the crustNeck, breast and shoulder are collagen-heavy cuts. Cut small, as the recipe directs, they may well be tender in the hour and a half given, but a thicker-cut shoulder is unlikely to be; if in doubt, simmer the chops in the bone gravy until they yield before they go into the dish, or bake longer and slower and accept a darker crust.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. If you take the longer, slower route above, drop to 300F and shield the pastry edge with foil.
- A quarter of a pint, a wine-glassfulAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, so a generous half cup of claret or port. A Victorian wine-glass is roughly 2 fl oz of the shallot vinegar, which is assertive; start with half that if your vinegar is a strong one.
- Pounded maceGround mace, sold as such now. Use it lightly, about a quarter teaspoon for a family-sized pasty, alongside a similar quantity of allspice.
- Shallot vinegarNot a shop item in most places. Steep a couple of sliced shallots in a cup of white wine vinegar for a week, or substitute good wine vinegar with the finely shredded onions the recipe already offers.
- The fatFarmed and wild venison are both very lean, so the mutton fat is doing real work. Firm beef suet, or strips of fatty pork belly or unsmoked bacon laid between the pieces, serves the same purpose and keeps the meat from drying.
- "A thick crust"Read as a sturdy shortcrust or suet crust laid over the dish rather than puff. The recipe does not say how the hot lemon-and-wine sauce gets in; a vent cut in the centre is the obvious route.
- YieldDepends entirely on the deer; a boned breast or shoulder may give anywhere from about a pound to several, so judge servings by the weight of trimmed meat rather than by the joint.
- On the marinadeThe book's objection reads as dated. A short wine marinade of a few hours mainly seasons the surface, while a long soak in a strongly acid mixture can leave the outer layer of lean venison mealy -- which may be the effect the book is objecting to.
Venison pasty was for centuries one of the great set-pieces of English cookery, and its prestige came from the fact that there was no legal open market for venison in England: deer were park property, and a haunch or a side arrived as a gift from a landowner, often after a journey long enough to make heavy spicing and a wine-and-vinegar liquor useful as much as ornamental. The earlier form was a raised standing pie with a thick, sometimes barely edible crust that acted as a container and a preservative, and the word pasty still carries that sense of meat wholly enclosed in paste. What Cassell's calls the "modern" pasty is the shift to a baking dish with a pastry lid and to the parts that do not roast well, which is why the seasonings here are working so hard. The brisk dismissal of overnight marinating is characteristic of the book's tone: Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a vast late-nineteenth-century compilation for middle-class households, regularly weighs one professional practice against another and tells the reader which side it is on.