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Venison, Shoulder of, Marinaded
Make a marinade by mixing together a pint of vinegar and a tea-spoonful of black pepper. Remove the bones from a shoulder of venison, flatten it on a table, and lay it, with the neck (from which half a pound of the meat has been cut), in the marinade. Let it lie for twelve hours. Mince the meat which was cut off with four ounces of fat bacon, and add a pinch of cayenne and a little grated nutmeg. Spread this forcemeat on the inside of the shoulder, roll and bind it tightly, and roast in the usual way. Serve with strong unflavoured gravy, and sweet or piquant sauce. Time to roast the joint, two hours to two hours and a half, according to size. Probable cost of venison, very uncertain.
A boned shoulder, briefly soured in vinegar, stuffed with a bacon forcemeat and rolled — a standard Victorian treatment for a lean, strongly flavoured joint. Two things need translating: the marinade, and the fact that a stuffed roll has to be cooked further than a plain venison joint.
- The marinadeA British pint is 20 fl oz, so 2½ cups of vinegar with a teaspoon of cracked black pepper. Malt or cider vinegar suits the meat better than distilled white. It is a raw, unboiled marinade — no wine, no oil, no aromatics — and its job is to soften and sharpen, not to flavour deeply.
- Twelve hours, refrigeratedThe original assumes a cold larder. Marinate in the refrigerator in a non-reactive dish or a bag, turning once. Twelve hours in straight vinegar is already a long soak for shoulder, and a longer one risks leaving the surface pale and softened.
- The jointA boned deer shoulder varies widely by species, from a pound or two for roe up to several pounds for red deer. Ask the butcher to bone and butterfly it; if neck is not available, take the half-pound of forcemeat meat from a trimmed piece of shoulder or neck instead.
- ForcemeatHalf a pound of venison minced with 4 oz fat bacon, cayenne and nutmeg. Grind or chop both cold, and keep the bacon proportion — the joint has almost no internal fat of its own and the stuffing is what keeps it from drying.
- Because it is stuffed, cook it throughAn unstuffed venison joint is best at 130-135F, but a raw minced venison-and-bacon filling sealed inside the roll must reach 160F. Take the temperature in the centre of the forcemeat, not the meat around it, and accept that the outer layers will be at medium rather than rare.
- "Roast in the usual way"Cassell's gives no temperature, and in the period roasting often still meant a well-basted joint before the fire. As a modern equivalent, start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the outside, drop to 325F, and baste with dripping or cover loosely with foil. The stated two to two and a half hours suits a large, tightly bound roll; a smaller roll will reach 160F inside well before that, so go by the thermometer.
- BindingRoll with the grain running the length of the joint and tie at 1-inch intervals with butcher's twine, tighter than feels necessary — the roll slackens as it cooks and a loose one falls open when carved.
- The sauces"Strong unflavoured gravy" is reduced venison or beef stock, unthickened and unseasoned beyond salt, so the sweet sauce can do the contrasting. Rowan or redcurrant jelly, or a Cumberland sauce, is what the period meant by "sweet or piquant".
- YieldA 3-4 lb stuffed roll serves six to eight. Rest it 15-20 minutes before slicing, and cut thinner than you would beef — cool venison firms up quickly on the plate.
Marinading was a common Victorian insurance policy on venison, which often reached kitchens as a gift or a purchase of unpredictable age from a park or estate rather than from a butcher's regular stock — hence Cassell's flat admission that the cost is "very uncertain." Shoulder was the awkward cut: too sinewy to roast whole with dignity, and the boned-stuffed-rolled treatment turned it into a joint that could be carried to table and carved. The bacon forcemeat answers a real deficiency, since a wild deer carries little intervening fat and nineteenth-century cookery books say so repeatedly; larding, barding and fat stuffings all appear in the same chapters. The pairing with a sweet jelly is older than the book and is generally traced to the medieval English taste for fruit and spice with game, which survived into the modern era with venison and mutton long after it had left beef.