Home › To Cook Game › To Roast Venison
To Roast Venison
Buck venison is considered the finest, and is in season from June to the end of September. Doe venison is in season from October to December.
A haunch of venison takes from four to five hours to roast, according to size; doe venison takes half an hour less than buck venison.
Venison should be hung from fourteen to twenty days in a dry larder, and be kept well wiped with a dry cloth each day. The fat should be clear and white and the meat dark; the greater the depth of fat the better the meat. Before putting the haunch down to the fire dry it well, and cover it all over with a buttered paper; cover this over again with a paste of flour and water about threequarters of an inch thick; lay over this paste another sheet of buttered paper tied on with B2 string. Roast before a good clear fire; baste the joint with butter and clarified fat. About fifteen minutes before the venison is finished roasting, remove all the papers and the paste, and baste every part of the joint with butter; dredge it very lightly with flour, brown it nicely, and serve it very hot with either clear gravy, Espagnole sauce or red currant jelly, or the following sauce.
This is spit-roasting instructions written for an open fire, and the timings belong to that method and to a whole haunch. The single most useful change is to cook to internal temperature rather than by the clock, because venison haunch is very lean and four hours will destroy it in an oven.
- Cook to temperature, not to timeA haunch roasted in a modern oven is done at about 130-135F at the thickest point for medium-rare, which on an 8-10 lb bone-in leg takes roughly 1.5 to 2.5 hours at 350F after an initial hot start. The four to five hours here assumes a whole haunch turned before an open fire, wrapped in paper and a thick flour paste and basted throughout, which is not comparable to an unwrapped joint in an enclosed oven.
- The paste is a heat shieldThe flour-and-water crust three-quarters of an inch thick is huff paste, not food. It insulates the lean surface so the outside does not dry out over hours of fire-roasting, and it is torn off and discarded before browning. In an oven, foil or a butter-soaked parchment cover does the same job with less trouble.
- Buttered paperRead this as parchment brushed with softened butter. Modern greaseproof or parchment paper is the direct equivalent; ordinary kitchen paper towel is not.
- Clarified fatThe text does not say which; clarified butter, clarified dripping or rendered suet would all fit. Clarified butter, beef fat or a neutral high-smoke-point oil all work today. Note that the recipe assumes a well-fatted haunch ('the greater the depth of fat the better the meat'); a leaner modern carcass may want larding or barding with pork fat or bacon.
- HangingFourteen to twenty days assumes a dry larder and daily wiping with a cloth, as the text says; note the buck season given here runs through the summer. Dry-aging game is still done, but it needs a dedicated chiller held at 34-40F with air movement; a domestic fridge or an unheated room will not reproduce it safely. Butcher-hung or vacuum-aged venison from a game dealer is the practical route.
- SeasonsThe buck and doe dates given reflect nineteenth-century British practice and do not match current statutory close seasons, which vary by species and by country. Ignore the dates and buy from a licensed game dealer.
- Sauces namedEspagnole is the brown mother sauce built on a dark roux and veal stock, a day's work in itself. "Clear gravy" means the strained roasting juices with stock, not a thickened flour gravy. Redcurrant jelly remains the standard accompaniment and is the easiest of the three.
- Resting and yieldThe original says nothing about resting, but a lean haunch needs 20-30 minutes loosely covered or the juices run out at the first cut. A haunch of that size serves ten to fifteen, and venison is served very hot on hot plates because the fat sets quickly as it cools.
Venison sits in a separate chapter in Victorian cookery books because it was, for most of the nineteenth century, closely tied to parks and estates: British deer belonged to landed property, and while venison was bought and sold through game and venison dealers, a haunch often arrived in a household as a gift from a landowner rather than as a purchase from a butcher. That explains the tone of this entry, which spends as much space on judging and hanging the joint as on cooking it, and which assumes the cook is dealing with a whole haunch of unknown age and unknown quality. The flour-and-water huff paste is an older English fire-roasting technique, used on the same principle for hams and for large joints of any very lean meat, and the closing offer of Espagnole sauce as an alternative to redcurrant jelly suggests a professionalised, French-influenced kitchen rather than plain country cookery.