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Venison Pasty, to Keep for Some Time
Cut the meat of a breast or shoulder of venison into pieces two inches square. Season these with pepper and salt, adding, if liked, a small pinch of grated nutmeg. Put them, fat and lean together, into a baking-dish, place a good slice of butter upon them, and cover the dish with a coarse paste of flour and water. Bake the pasty in a moderately-heated oven for a couple of hours, and keep it in a cool, dry place. When wanted, remove the coarse crust, line the edges and sides of the dish with good pastry, pour in a small quantity of strong gravy, cover with pastry, and bake in a good oven till the crust is firm. Time to bake the pastry, about an hour. Probable cost of venison, very uncertain.
The two-stage method here is a genuine old preserving technique, and it is the reason this recipe cannot be followed today. The points below explain the terms and the specific failure.
- The hinge is the storage step, and it is the problemThe venison is baked, then held under its crust in "a cool, dry place" for an unstated length of time before being re-baked in fresh pastry. Cooked meat kept between roughly 40F and 140F is in the range where Clostridium perfringens multiplies rapidly, and a heavy crust restricts air movement around the meat. Neither the temperature nor the holding period is specified, so there is no way to bring the method inside any modern safety margin.
- "A cool, dry place" was a stone larder"A cool, dry place" -- In a Victorian house this would typically have meant an unheated pantry or cellar, cold enough in winter but not in summer. It is not a description of a refrigerator, and a modern kitchen has no equivalent space.
- "Some time" is not a shelf lifeThe title promises keeping qualities but the recipe never says for how long — days, or weeks. Any preserving instruction without a measured time, temperature and salt or acid level should be treated as unusable rather than approximated.
- The coarse paste is not foodThe coarse paste is not the eating crust -- The flour-and-water covering, of the sort sometimes called huff paste, acted as a protective lid to be broken off and replaced with the good pastry later. It was not the crust intended for the table, and it does not seal reliably enough to be a preservative in its own right.
- Oven language, for referenceThe book gives no temperatures. "Moderately-heated" is usually read today as a moderate oven and "a good oven" as something hotter, but these are approximations offered only to explain the original text, not as working directions for this dish.
- If you want venison pastyUse a current recipe that cooks and serves the pie in one pass, or chills the cooked filling promptly and holds it under refrigeration for a stated number of days.
- "Probable cost, very uncertain"Venison often came to a household as a gift from an estate rather than a purchase, and where it was bought the price varied widely, which is presumably why the book declines to quote one.
Venison pasty was one of the set pieces of English pie cookery, and it carried an aristocratic association: deer were park animals, and haunches and breasts often travelled from country estates to town houses as presents, which may be why no price is quoted. The technique described here belongs to an older tradition of baking meat under a thick flour-and-water crust — the sort of paste sometimes called huff paste — used to shield meat during a long bake and to keep air off meat that had to keep or be carried a distance; potting under a seal of clarified butter works on comparable logic. Breast and shoulder are tougher and fattier than the haunch, and the long first bake would have helped tenderise them as well as cook them through. The recipe survives in a Victorian household dictionary because such books were still written for houses with cold larders and unpredictable gluts of game, a domestic arrangement that has no modern counterpart.