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Venison Steaks, with Bacon
Take the desired number of steaks, and partly cook them in a frying-pan. Then put a slice of bacon, cut to size, on each side, and when the bacon is cooked and browned the steaks are ready to be served. They are usually served with a bread sauce made with stock or gravy in place of milk, and rather highly flavoured with cayenne, mace, and cinnamon. Cranberry jelly should also be served as an adjunct.
A terse Victorian method that assumes you know venison and can judge a pan by eye. The whole thing hinges on not overcooking the meat while the bacon renders.
- The hinge: don't cook it twiceVenison loin and haunch steaks are almost fat-free and turn dry and liver-like past medium. Sear the steaks hard and briefly, then finish with the bacon pressed against them; pull the meat at 130-135F internal and rest it five minutes.
- "Partly cook them"The recipe gives no timing or thickness. On a steak around an inch thick in a very hot pan, roughly a minute a side is enough to colour it without cooking through, with the bacon stage adding a few minutes more per side; treat these as working estimates, not the book's instruction.
- Bacon on each sideThe bacon acts as a barding fat rather than a garnish, basting the lean meat as it renders. Thin-cut streaky bacon cut to the outline of the steak works well, and it helps to keep it pressed against the meat. Unsmoked British-style back or streaky bacon is likely nearer to what the book assumed than heavily smoked, sugar-cured American bacon, though the recipe does not specify.
- The bread sauceStandard bread sauce is milk, onion, cloves and crumbs; here the milk is replaced by stock or gravy, which makes it closer to a thick brown crumb sauce than the pale one served with poultry. Reckon on roughly a cup of good game or beef stock to a cup of fresh soft breadcrumbs, simmered until it slackens into a spoonable purée.
- Mace and cayenneMace is the lacy aril that covers the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the nutmeg itself; a quarter teaspoon of ground mace goes a long way. The recipe asks for the sauce to be "rather highly flavoured," so season assertively, but add cayenne cautiously -- an eighth of a teaspoon is a sensible starting point.
- Cranberry jellyThe strained, set kind rather than whole-berry sauce. Redcurrant jelly is the more usual British partner for venison and works identically here.
- YieldOne 6-8 oz steak per person, with two rashers of bacon each. Farmed venison from a butcher behaves much like the wild meat the book assumes, though it is milder and slightly fattier.
Cassell's belongs to a long English tradition of treating venison as a meat that needs help: because deer carry almost no intramuscular fat, cooks have wrapped, larded and barded it for centuries, and pork fat has generally been the usual remedy. The accompaniments here are equally traditional က— sweet-sharp fruit jelly against rich dark meat, and a bread sauce carrying the medieval-tasting warm spices of mace and cinnamon, a survival of much older English spicing that is often said to have retreated from everyday cookery by the late nineteenth century but hung on in game dishes. That venison appears at all in a general household dictionary is telling: it was not shop meat for most Victorian readers but something that often arrived as a gift from an estate. The recipe simply says "the desired number of steaks", though vague quantities are a general habit of the book's style.