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Venison Haunch
Prepare the venison as you would mutton.
Put in a baking-pan, lard with a little bacon, add a pint of water, a gill of red wine, salt, and a little cayenne pepper. Bake quickly, and serve with or without gravy.
A haunch is the whole hind leg, a lean cut of five to ten pounds that will be dry and grey if treated like beef. The instruction that matters is the larding: without added fat, and without pulling the roast at the right internal temperature, this cut has almost nothing to protect it.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. With a pint of water alongside it, this is a shallow braise-roast rather than a dry roast, and the liquid should be topped up if the pan threatens to go dry.
- "Bake quickly"I.e. in a hot oven, roughly 425-450F in modern terms. The high heat suits a lean leg, but only for a short time; with a large joint you may want to start it hot to colour the outside and drop to about 325F once it has taken colour, though the recipe itself says nothing beyond "quickly."
- Doneness, not timeThe original gives no timing at all. Use a thermometer in the thickest part away from the bone: 125-130F for rare to medium-rare, which is where venison leg belongs. Past about 140F it turns dry and livery.
- Larding with bacon"Lard with a little bacon" means threading strips of fat through the meat with a larding needle, or at minimum draping the joint in bacon or barding fat. Farmed venison is a little fatter than wild but still very lean, so this step is not optional.
- RestingRest the joint 15-20 minutes under loose foil before carving. A lean leg carved straight from the oven loses most of its juice to the board.
- "As you would mutton"In practice, trimming the joint, removing any membrane or silverskin, and seasoning it well. Wild venison also wants any bloodshot or bruised tissue cut away.
- The pan liquidThe water, wine and drippings make the "gravy" the recipe leaves optional. Strain, skim the fat and reduce hard; it will be thin, and a little redcurrant jelly or a knob of butter gives it body.
- YieldA bone-in haunch of six to eight pounds should serve eight to ten. Carve in thin slices.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, was written for households where game still arrived from the woods rather than the butcher, and venison here needs no more introduction than "prepare as you would mutton" — a comparison a nineteenth-century cook would find useful, both being lean, strong-flavoured joints roasted on the bone. White-tailed deer were hunted throughout Virginia from the colonial period, and the brevity of the instructions suggests how routine the meat was; the red wine and cayenne answer game's assertive flavour much as redcurrant jelly did in England. Larding with bacon was a common remedy for lean meat, and it is the one part of this recipe that no modern shortcut fully replaces.