Home › The Principles of Cookery › VENISON PASTY (another way) (If the meat is fresh keep it)
VENISON PASTY (another way) (If the meat is fresh keep it)
If the meat is fresh, keep it for a fortnight or three weeks, cut it into pieces, boil it well, and make good gravy; season with pepper, salt, port wine, vinegar, and a little sugar (according to taste); if not fat, put in a little fat mutton. Let the meat get cold, and then pack it in a dish as close as you can, put it in the oven, and bake till done.
A stripped-down version of a dish Cassell's assumed every reader already knew, which is why it never mentions the crust. Read it as a set of amendments to the fuller venison pasty recipes that precede it.
- The missing pastryA pasty is defined by its paste. This version tells you only to pack the cold meat into a dish and bake, but the dish wants a lid of rough puff or a plain hot-water crust rolled about a quarter-inch thick, sealed to the rim. Without it you have a casserole, not a pasty.
- Hanging the venison"Keep it for a fortnight or three weeks" describes hanging in a cold larder; the instruction assumes venison that has not yet been aged. Modern game is usually hung for you; if you hang your own, it needs a controlled 34-40F with good air movement, and butcher's judgement about when to stop. Farmed venison from a butcher will generally need no further ageing.
- Boil it well, then bakeThe double cooking is deliberate: the boil tenderises tough haunch or shoulder and yields the gravy, and the bake is only long enough to colour the crust and heat the filling through. Simmer the meat gently for 2 to 2 1/2 hours rather than at a rolling boil, or the lean muscle shreds.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven heat. For a pastry lid over already-cooked meat, 400-425F for 30-40 minutes will set and brown it. "Bake till done" is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- Fat muttonWild venison carries almost no intramuscular fat, and the old fix was strips or dice of mutton fat laid among the meat. Beef suet or good pork back fat does the same job now; allow about 3 oz to 2 lb of venison.
- Port, vinegar and sugarThis is a sweet-sour game seasoning of a kind that had been on English tables since the medieval period. A useful starting ratio for 2 lb of meat is a wineglass of port, a tablespoon of vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar, tasted and adjusted once the gravy has reduced.
- Packing it coldThe meat is cooled before it goes into the dish so the pieces settle tightly and the gravy sets around them. Chill it thoroughly and refrigerate; a Victorian larder was cold, a modern kitchen is not, and cooked meat should not stand out for hours.
- YieldTwo pounds of boneless venison with its gravy fills a two-pint pie dish and serves six.
Venison pasty was, for centuries, less a recipe than a social signal. Deer from English parks were, by custom and estate practice as much as by law, not generally sold — a convention that had in any case loosened well before Cassell's — so venison reached most tables as a gift from a landowner, and the pasty was the standard way of sending it any distance: a stout crust that travelled, protected the meat, and could be broken open at table. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s the dish was still expected of a good kitchen but the raw material had changed, with Scottish and imported deer reaching the trade and much of the mystique gone. The sweet-sour seasoning here, with port, vinegar and sugar, is a survival of the older English habit of dressing game and dark meat with fruit and spice, and the note about adding mutton fat is a frank acknowledgement that wild deer is far too lean to make a good pie on its own. The recipe's brevity, appearing as "another way" beneath a fuller version, is typical of the dictionary's method: it assumes you have already read the long entry and simply want the variant.