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Haunch of Vension
Rub the venison over with pepper, salt, and butter. Repeat the rubbing. After it has been put in the oven, put in as much cold water as will prevent burning and draw the gravy. Stick five or six cloves in different parts of the venison. Add enough water to make sufficient gravy. Just before dinner, put in a glass of red wine and a lump of butter rolled in flour, and let it stew a little longer.--Mrs. T.
A bare-bones roasting note of the kind written for cooks who already knew how to run a hearth or a wood range. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the cut, and how far to take the meat.
- What a haunch isThe whole hind leg, bone in, which on a wild deer runs roughly 6 to 10 lb and on farmed venison can go higher. A boned and tied leg or a 3 to 4 lb top round from the leg behaves the same way and is far easier to carve.
- The oven temperature it never givesStart at 425F for about 20 minutes to set the surface, then drop to 325F for the rest. The recipe names no temperature; an 1870s wood-fired oven would most likely have been falling in heat through the roast, which does much the same thing on its own.
- Doneness is the hingeVenison has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and liverish past medium. Pull it at 125-130F at the thickest point for rare to medium-rare and rest 15 to 20 minutes; the carryover will bring it to about 135F. Reckon 12 to 15 minutes per pound as a rough guide and trust the thermometer over the clock.
- The water in the panThis is a shallow braise-roast, not a dry roast. A cup or so of water in the pan keeps the drippings from scorching and gives you the base of the gravy; top it up as it cooks away, but keep it below the meat rather than around it.
- "A glass of red wine"In nineteenth-century American cookbooks a wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. Start with 1/4 cup of a dry red and add more to taste.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manié: work equal parts soft butter and flour into a paste, roughly a tablespoon of each, and whisk it into the simmering pan juices in small pieces. It thickens in two or three minutes; give it long enough to cook through or the gravy will taste of raw flour.
- The clovesFive or six whole cloves pushed into the meat is a strong hand by modern taste. Three or four is plenty, and pull them out before carving so no one bites down on one.
- Fat and bastingBecause the leg is so lean, the twice-repeated butter rub matters. Bard the top with bacon or a sheet of pork fat if the animal was wild and hard-worked, and baste every 20 minutes from the pan.
- YieldA bone-in haunch of 7 to 8 lb serves 8 to 10. Serve with currant or crabapple jelly, as Virginia tables did.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and generally dated to 1877-78 (John P. Morton, Louisville), gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with an initial rather than a name -- "Mrs. T." here is one of that anonymous chorus. Venison was still ordinary meat in much of the Virginia Piedmont and mountains at the time, taken by the household or bought from a neighbor rather than a butcher, and a haunch was the showpiece cut for a large dinner. The treatment -- clove-studded, roasted over water, finished with red wine and a butter-and-flour liaison -- closely resembles the English country-house tradition that Virginia cookery kept close to for generations, and the accompanying tart jelly, meant to cut the leanness of the meat, belongs to the same family of practice.