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VENISON, SADDLE OF, CRUSTED (a German recipe)
The venison must be hung some time, but not long enough to make it high. After washing, lay it in a broad pan to cook with cold water enough to cover it; and in this put a small tea-cupful of vinegar, two or three carrots, onions, bay-leaves, a good bunch of sweet-herbs, including basil and a sprig of marjoram, some salt, pepper, about twenty juniper berries, as many whole pimento, and six cloves. Let it come slowly to a scalding heat. Skim and leave it to simmer two hours or more, according to size. It must be done tender. Then take it up, spread over it a beaten egg, and on this sprinkle a thick layer of bread-crumbs mixed with a table-spoonful of moist sugar, a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, and half a dozen pounded cloves. Brown bread is best for this. The coating must be a third of an inch thick or more. Skim off a little of the fat boilings, and sprinkle the crumbs over with it. Put the venison in the oven, and let it bake a nice brown. Serve good fruit sauce with it.
This is a two-stage dish: the saddle is poached in an aromatic court-bouillon, then given a sweet-spiced crumb coat and browned in the oven. The crust is the point, and it will only stay put if the meat is dry and the egg is applied while the joint is still hot.
- Hanging"Hung some time, but not long enough to make it high" means dry-aged in a cold place until the flavour deepens but before any taint develops. Butcher's venison sold today has already been hung; buy it aged and use it fresh, and do not attempt to age a saddle in a domestic fridge or garage.
- A small tea-cupful of vinegarA teacupful in period cookery is usually reckoned at roughly a quarter of a pint, so a small one is perhaps 3-4 fl oz (about ½ cup). Plain wine or cider vinegar suits the aromatics better than malt.
- Pimento is allspice"Whole pimento" means allspice berries, not paprika or pimiento peppers. Twenty berries plus twenty juniper is a lot of spice, but it is diluted across several quarts of poaching liquor.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar; light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent. The tablespoon in the crumb mix is there to help the coating caramelise, not to sweeten the meat.
- Brown bread crumbs"brown bread" here means a wholemeal loaf, dried and crumbed fairly fine. Fresh soft crumbs will slump; day-old bread grated gives the third-of-an-inch crust the recipe calls for.
- Two hours is for old, wild meatA large saddle from mature wild deer will take that long to become tender. Farmed or young venison saddle is very lean and turns grey and dry well before two hours; test with a skewer from about 45 minutes and stop when it yields. The loin muscles are the first to suffer.
- Oven heatThe oven is only setting and colouring the crust, so 400-425F (200-220C) for 15-20 minutes is enough. Basting the crumbs with skimmed fat from the poaching liquor, as directed, is what stops them scorching dry.
- Fruit sauceIn the German tradition this means redcurrant jelly, cranberries or a spiced sour-cherry or plum compote, served warm. Cumberland sauce works equally well.
- YieldA 4-6 lb saddle serves six to eight. Strain and reduce the poaching liquor for gravy rather than discarding it.
Crusted saddle of venison is generally traced to the German Rehrücken, in which a saddle of roe deer is treated with juniper, vinegar and sweet spices, though the browned sweet-spiced coating here rests on little more than the recipe's own label as a German dish. The combination of sugar, cinnamon and cloves on meat looks odd to modern British eyes but is straightforwardly Central European: the same sweet-sour instinct that puts redcurrant jelly, cherries or spiced plums on the plate beside game. Poaching before browning is a practical response to wild venison, which is lean and can be sinewy, and which in the nineteenth century arrived at the kitchen having been hung for what would often be said to be longer than modern practice favours. Cassell's, compiled in the later nineteenth century as a household reference rather than a single cook's book, gathered continental recipes like this one alongside English ones and labelled them by nationality, which tells you something about how far the ambitious Victorian middle-class table was looking beyond its own borders.