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Venison Stew
Cut one slice venison steak in inch pieces. Cover with chicken or veal stock; simmer until tender, about fifteen minutes; season with salt and pepper; add one cup currant jelly and serve. Sautéd Bananas Peel and cut four bananas in four pieces; melt two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons sugar, and one half cup sherry; when hot, add bananas, and cook until bananas are hot and tender.
Two chafing-dish recipes have run together in the printing: a venison stew and sautéd bananas. Both are quick pan dishes meant to be cooked at table, and both assume you already know what a chafing dish will and will not do.
- The cut is the whole recipeFifteen minutes only works on venison loin or a tender leg steak, cut small and barely cooked through. Shoulder, neck or shank needs two to three hours of moist heat and will be leather in a chafing dish.
- Cook it rareVenison is very lean and has almost no connective tissue in the loin. Pull the pieces off the heat while still pink inside; past medium they turn dry and livery no matter how much jelly is added.
- A cup of jelly is a lotOne cup of currant jelly against a single steak's worth of meat gives a nearly candied sauce. Start with two or three tablespoons stirred into the stock and add more to taste; a little vinegar or lemon juice balances it.
- StockStock in a book of this date would generally have been homemade and lightly seasoned or unseasoned, closer to a light broth than a reduced demi-glace. Commercial boxed stock is already salted, so taste before adding the salt the recipe calls for.
- Sautéd bananasMelt the butter and sugar together, then add the half cup of sherry off the flame and let it come to a simmer to cook off the raw alcohol before the bananas go in. Firm, barely ripe bananas hold their shape; soft ones collapse into sauce in a minute or two.
- YieldOne steak feeds two as a light supper dish. The bananas serve four.
Lowney's was a chocolate company, and its cook book belongs to the era when the chafing dish was fashionable equipment in American entertaining — a spirit-lamp pan for late suppers, card parties and college rooms, where food was cooked in front of guests rather than carried in from a kitchen. Whether this particular pair of recipes was meant for one is not stated on the page. Currant jelly with venison is the older English pairing, generally traced to the medieval habit of serving strong meats with sharp-sweet fruit sauces, and it survived in nineteenth-century American cookery as the near-automatic accompaniment to game. Bananas had become cheap and common in northern cities by the 1890s through the Caribbean steamer trade, and cooks were still working out what to do with them beyond eating them raw.