James J Corbett
PASSION FRUIT SALAD
Remove the inside of a "Passion Fruit" and slice the same, together with sliced peaches, oranges, apples, bananas and any fruit you may desire. Place same in salad dish ready to serve.
The taste of the "Passion Fruit" will predominate and anyone who has ever eaten any will verify that it is one of the most delectable dishes in the world.
This fruit grows exclusively in Australia and nearly every incoming steamer from that country has a consignment for me.
Yours sincerely, Jus J. Corbett
VENISON CUTLETS
With Port Wine Sauce Slices of venison cut from the loin and sprinkled over with melted butter, pepper and salt.
Roll in dry bread crumbs and either broil for five minutes or sauté in butter. Serve very hot with portwine sauce, which is made of one cup of brown sauce without onion, an eighth tumbler of currant jelly, a small glass of port and a dash of red pepper.
In the hunting season this dish makes the most delightful breakfast. It should be cooked while on a hunting trip out-ofdoors on the camp fire. Yours sincerely,
Two contributions from the champion: a fruit salad that is really an excuse to show off an imported ingredient, and a genuinely well-built venison dish whose sauce measurements are given in barware.
- A tumbler, and an eighth of oneA tumbler in this period is roughly 8 fl oz, so an eighth is about 1 fl oz, or two tablespoons, of currant jelly. The "small glass" of port probably means a port or sherry glass, around 2 fl oz.
- Brown sauceThis means a proper espagnole or demi-glace, not bottled brown sauce in the British sense. A reduced veal or beef stock thickened with a brown roux stands in; the qualifier "without onion" suggests the brown sauce being assumed would ordinarily have contained some.
- Venison loin cooks fastLoin is almost fat-free and turns dry and livery past medium-rare. Five minutes under a hot broiler or in butter is about right for slices half an inch thick; pull them at 130-135F internal and rest briefly.
- The crumb coatingDry breadcrumbs over melted butter will brown well in a pan but scorch under a broiler before the meat is done. If broiling, keep the rack lower than you would for a plain cutlet.
- Passion fruitSplit the fruit and spoon out the pulp and seeds rather than trying to "slice the same" — the interior is a gel, not flesh. The seeds are edible and are part of the texture. Two or three fruit will flavour a bowl for six.
- Keep the salad from browningApples and bananas discolour quickly. The passion fruit pulp and the orange juice released in slicing are acidic and will help hold them if you toss everything together immediately and serve at once.
- YieldNeither recipe states one. The salad as described serves four to six; allow two venison cutlets and about a quarter cup of sauce per person.
This comes from a charity cookbook of contributions from stage performers, a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century and in which the celebrity's name mattered more than the cooking. James J. Corbett (1866-1933) beat John L. Sullivan for the heavyweight title in 1892 and spent decades afterward acting in melodrama and vaudeville, so his appearance among the actor folk is legitimate. His claim that passion fruit "grows exclusively in Australia" was wrong even then — Passiflora edulis is South American in origin — though the recipe does note that steamers brought consignments. The venison recipe, with its brown sauce and currant jelly and its instruction to cook it over a camp fire, belongs to the older sporting-gentleman tradition: port and redcurrant with game is a British hunting-house pairing that American restaurants of the period borrowed wholesale.