Home › Chafing Dish Delicacies › Venison with Currant Jelly
Venison with Currant Jelly
Melt two tablespoons butter; add one quarter teaspoon salt, few grains cayenne, one tablespoon lemon juice, one cup currant jelly, one cup sherry; cook five minutes. Keep hot while cooking slice of venison steak in chafing dish eight minutes. Serve sauce with venison.
A chafing dish sauce built on the classic venison-and-currant pairing. The recipe assumes a thin cut and a hot pan, and its timing is the one thing worth ignoring.
- The eight minutesVenison is very lean and has almost no intramuscular fat to buffer overcooking, so eight minutes will take a steak well past done and into liver-like dryness. Cook a half-inch loin or leg steak two to three minutes a side and pull it at 125-130F for medium rare.
- Chafing dish heatA spirit lamp under a chafing dish gives modest heat, which may be part of why the original allows so long. On a modern burner or in a skillet you have far more power; get the pan properly hot, sear, and rest the meat while you finish the sauce.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not blackcurrant preserve or jam. If you cannot find it, a tart redcurrant or lingonberry jelly behaves the same way; anything with whole fruit will not melt down smoothly.
- The sherryA dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry, or the cup of jelly will make the sauce cloying. Five minutes at a brisk simmer is enough to blow off the raw spirit edge and thicken the sauce slightly; it will not reduce to a glaze in that time.
- BalanceTwo cups of jelly and wine to one tablespoon of lemon juice is sweet by current taste. Taste at the end and add lemon juice, or a splash of red wine vinegar, until the sauce reads sharp against the meat.
- Cayenne"Few grains" means a very small pinch off the tip of a knife, perhaps a sixteenth to an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there for warmth behind the sweetness, not for heat you can identify.
- YieldThe sauce as written makes roughly two cups, enough for four to six servings. Halve it if you are cooking a single steak, or keep the remainder refrigerated a few days and rewarm gently.
Venison with currant jelly is a familiar English game pairing: sweet-tart fruit against dark, lean meat, a habit often traced to the medieval taste for sharp sauces with roast game, though the currant jelly convention itself is best attested rather later. Its appearance in a chafing dish chapter is telling. Lowney's book dates from the era when the chafing dish was a fashionable piece of American parlor and late-supper equipment, used for oysters, lobster Newburg, welsh rarebit and small quantities of expensive meat cooked in front of guests. Venison steak fit that brief precisely: quick-cooking, and needing nothing more than a spirit lamp and a bright sauce made from two pantry luxuries, jelly and sherry.