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Venison Soup, Brown
Cut about a pound and a half of the breast of venison into small pieces, and stew them with a small piece of fresh butter for half an hour. Turn them about occasionally, and be careful that they do not burn. Mix a quart of cold water with a quarter of a pint of the blood, put the liquor into a separate stewpan, and stir till it boils. Put the stew into it, and add six or eight black peppercorns, an onion minced small, and the red part of a carrot grated: then simmer the soup gently for from one hour and a half to two hours. Strain the soup, and thicken with brown thickening. Put the meat into it again, add a glassful of wine, make it thoroughly hot, and serve. When the blood is objected to, it may be omitted, and beef or mutton stock substituted for the water. French beans cut into diamonds, and carrots and turnips cut into dice, may be served with this soup.
A game soup of the old English kind, thickened first with blood and then with a brown roux. Everything here still works, though the blood is now the hard part to source.
- The bloodA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (a gill). Fresh deer blood is not a retail item and blood from wild-shot game is not collected under any hygiene control; unless you have blood from a licensed game dealer or butcher, take the escape hatch the recipe itself offers and use beef or mutton stock. Pig's blood from a butcher behaves similarly if you want the colour and body.
- Keep it below a simmer once blood is inBoiling tends to set blood into grains, so the instruction to "stir till it boils" works against a smooth thickening (though the soup is strained later, which would catch them). For a smooth result hold the liquid below a simmer and stir constantly, as with a civet of hare.
- Imperial measuresA quart here is the imperial 40 fl oz, so about 1.1 litres. A "glassful" of wine in Victorian cookery books usually means a wineglass, about 2 fl oz; port, madeira or a robust red all suit.
- Brown thickeningThis is the book's term for a brown roux — butter and flour cooked together until nut-coloured — whisked in and simmered out. Roughly 1 oz each of butter and flour will thicken this quantity to soup consistency.
- Breast of venisonThe breast and flank are the sinewy, well-worked cuts that reward long wet cooking. Shoulder or shin of venison are the modern equivalents; leg or loin will go dry and stringy over two hours and is wasted here.
- The initial stewingHalf an hour in butter over low heat is a slow sweat to draw out juices, not a hard sear. Watch it: the butter will brown and then burn well before the meat is coloured if the heat creeps up.
- Straining and returning the meatThe soup is strained to remove the peppercorns, onion and grated carrot, then the meat goes back. Pick the meat out before straining, or you will lose it into the sieve.
- YieldRoughly a litre of finished soup once it has simmered down — four modest first-course servings. The optional beans, carrot and turnip cut into diamonds and dice should be cooked separately and dropped in at the end so they keep their shape and colour.
Venison soup belongs to the long British tradition of cooking deer as a gentleman's meat: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries much venison came from private parks rather than open markets, arriving at the kitchen whole and in awkward quantities, which is why cookery books of the period offer so many ways to use the breast, neck and scraps once the haunch had been roasted. Thickening with the animal's own blood is older still, the same technique that gives jugged hare, French civet and Scottish game soups their dark gloss and faintly metallic depth; it survives on the Continent more visibly than in Britain, and the matter-of-fact line "when the blood is objected to" suggests some distaste for it among the book's readers. Offering the substitution without comment suits a dictionary aimed at households of very different means and very different kitchens.