Roast Venison
Lard a saddle of venison, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour. Place in dripping pan and baste with melted butter.
Allow ten minutes to the pound for roasting. Serve with Madeira or Currant Jelly sauce. Venison Steak or Chops Broiled or pan-broiled same as beefsteak or lamb chops, and serve with some acid sauce.
CHAPTER V
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century books, where the cook was assumed to know oven heat and doneness by eye. Venison is the leanest common roasting meat, and everything here turns on not overcooking it.
- The hinge: internal temperatureA saddle of venison has almost no intramuscular fat and goes dry and liver-flavored past medium rare. Pull it at 125-130F at the thickest point and rest it 15 minutes; carryover will bring it to about 135F.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book leaves the heat to the cook's judgment. Ten minutes to the pound implies a hot oven, and something in the region of 425-450F would suit a saddle: high heat, short time, no covering.
- Ten minutes to the poundTreat this as a rough guide only. A saddle is a long, tapering cut, so weight is a poor predictor; a thermometer in the loin is the only reliable measure, and a small saddle may be done in 35-40 minutes.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of firm pork fat or fatback through the meat with a larding needle. If you have no needle, bard instead: tie sheets of fatback or thin-sliced unsmoked bacon over the loins and remove them for the last ten minutes to let the surface brown.
- A saddle of venisonThe whole loin section with both sides attached, bone in, running from the last rib to the hip. Whole saddles are special-order from a game dealer; two boneless loins or a bone-in rack are the usual substitutes and cook considerably faster.
- Farmed venisonMuch of the venison sold now is farmed red deer or fallow, milder and somewhat fatter than the wild whitetail Lowney's readers would have had. Wild venison benefits from the larding more.
- Dredge with flourThe flour was meant to form a crust and thicken the pan drippings. At high heat it scorches easily, so keep the basting butter moving over it, and expect the pan juices to want straining.
- The acid sauceCurrant jelly sauce is jelly melted with a little stock, port or Madeira and pan juices; the sharpness cuts the dryness of lean game, which is why the book insists on "some acid sauce" for the steaks and chops as well.
- YieldA full bone-in saddle of 6-8 lb serves eight to ten. Two boneless loins serve four to six.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many branded cookbooks American food companies issued to put their product into home kitchens, padded out with a full general-purpose recipe collection so that it would be kept on the shelf. Venison appears in it as an ordinary market meat rather than a rarity: through the nineteenth century commercial hunters shipped wild game by rail to city markets in enormous quantities, and saddle of venison was a standard hotel and club roast. That trade was closing down as this book went to press, since state game laws and then the federal Lacey Act of 1900 progressively shut off interstate traffic in wild game, and venison passed from the butcher's counter to the hunter's own kitchen. The pairing with currant jelly is older still and is generally traced to English game cookery, where a sweet-sharp preserve was the conventional foil for lean, strongly flavored meat.