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VENISON SOUP (another way)
Take the broken-up bones, trimmings, and remains of various kinds of game; put them into a stewpan, pour over them three quarts of stock made from beef or mutton bones, and stew gently for two hours. Strain the soup, pick the meat from the bones, let it get cold, and pound till smooth with a little butter. Stir it into the strained stock, and put it back into the stewpan with a carrot, an onion, a few sticks of celery, a blade of mace pounded, and a little salt and cayenne. Simmer the soup half an hour, and skim carefully. Cut some fresh venison into neat slices, flour these, and brown them in the frying-pan. Put them into the soup, and stew them till tender but not overdone. Take out the vegetables, add a glassful of port and a table-spoonful of red currant jelly to the soup, and serve it with the meat in the dish. Time, about four hours.
A two-stage soup: a game stock thickened with pounded cooked meat, then fresh venison browned and stewed in it. The stages need different handling, and the second is where it goes wrong.
- The hinge: the venison slicesFresh venison is very lean and turns dry and grainy the moment it passes medium. Cut the slices thin, brown them hard, and give them only as long in the simmering soup as they need to be tender — a few minutes for loin or steak, longer only for shoulder or shank. "Tender but not overdone" is the whole instruction.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe starts from three quarts of stock and gives no yield; some reduction happens over the cooking, and six to eight servings is a reasonable reckoning. A glassful of port means a wineglassful, conventionally about 2 fl oz.
- Pounding the meatThe picked meat pounded smooth with butter is a mortar-and-pestle job; a processor does it in seconds. Add the butter to help it come together, and pass the paste through a sieve if you want the silky texture the original assumes.
- MaceA blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril from a nutmeg, pounded. If you have none, a scant pinch of ground mace, or nutmeg grated very sparingly, stands in — mace is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg, so go light.
- StewpanAny heavy pot large enough to hold four quarts comfortably. The Victorian stewpan was a straight-sided lidded saucepan, not the modern lidded casserole dish.
- SkimmingGame bones throw a great deal of scum and fat. Skim while it comes up rather than at the end, and if you can, chill the strained stock so the fat lifts off in a sheet before the vegetables go in.
- The finishPort and redcurrant jelly go in off the boil, at the very end. Boiling the wine after it is added strips it of the fruit and leaves a flat, slightly bitter edge; the jelly needs only enough heat to dissolve.
- Sourcing the bones"Remains of various kinds of game" assumes a larder of birds and hares. A butcher's venison bones, a roast pheasant or duck carcass, or a mixture of dark poultry frames all give the same effect: the soup wants depth and gaminess, not one particular animal.
Venison soup belongs to the tradition of the game larder rather than the market stall — it exists because a household that shot or was given whole animals had bones, trimmings and cold scraps to account for, and the second-day soup was where they went. The signature of the style is the finish: port and redcurrant jelly, a pairing long used in English cookery with roast venison, hare and mutton, sweet-sharp against the iron taste of dark meat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in London in the later nineteenth century, ran multiple versions of many dishes — hence "another way" — and this one shows the older practice of thickening a soup with pounded meat rather than flour or cream, a technique that recalls the eighteenth-century cullis or coulis and which fell out of use as easier thickenings took over.