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Entrées: Poivrade
Côtelettes de venaison à l'Américaine are served with a rich Espagnole sauce. au jus de groseilles-with Poivrade sauce and red currant jelly.
Rouelles de cerf à la St. Hubert are slices of fillet of venison, larded, and cooked in brown sauce with wine, slices of gherkins, etc.; served with a compote of French plums.
Côtelettes de chevreuil sautées are cutlets of roebuck cooked in butter, with wine, stock, mushrooms, etc., and served in the sauce. sautées sauce Poivrade are sauté, and served in Poivrade sauce with pickled mushrooms. à la Bohémienne are soaked in marinade, breadcrumbed and broiled; served in brown sauce with some of the marinade, currant jelly, etc.
Venison and roebuck, cut into cutlets and slices rather than roasted whole. The page names three different animals where a modern butcher offers one word, and its whole technique is aimed at meat that has been hung a long time.
- Three deer, one modern labelVenaison, cerf and chevreuil are distinguished here: venison generally, red deer, and roebuck. A counter today says venison and means farmed fallow or red deer, which is younger, fatter and far milder than the wild roebuck these dishes assume. The sauces on this page were built to stand up to something stronger than what you will bring home.
- Go easy on the marinadeSoaked in marinade appears twice, and for long-hung wild meat a day or two in wine and aromatics tenderised it and tamed the flavour. Farmed venison needs neither. Left in acid overnight it goes mealy and loses the clean taste that is its main virtue, so a few hours is the most these recipes should be given now.
- Poivrade is the pepper sauceThe name is from poivre, and the sauce is sharp and peppery, usually finished with the reduced marinade. Its job on the page is to cut richness, which is also why the pickled mushrooms and the sliced gherkins are there. Modern venison cookery leans on sweetness and juniper and has largely dropped the acid, with the result that the meat sits heavier.
- Currant jelly was standard, not a flourishAu jus de groseilles is served with Poivrade sauce and red currant jelly together: sharp sauce and sweet jelly on the same plate. The pairing survives in Britain as a garnish; here it is part of the construction.
- Prunes with venisonRouelles de cerf à la St. Hubert comes with a compote of French plums, which is to say prunes, stewed and served hot beside the meat. Dried fruit with game has narrowed almost entirely to redcurrant and the odd blackberry; the older range was wider and the dried fruit carried it better.
- These cuts are very leanCutlets of roebuck cooked in butter and served in their sauce will be dry if treated as the page’s brown-sauce braises imply, because farmed venison loin has almost no internal fat. Cook it fast, keep it pink, and let the sauce do the rest. The book’s long cooking belongs to meat that needed it.
A page devoted to slices and cutlets rather than to the haunch tells you something: this household was getting whole deer, or substantial parts of them, and had to deal with the pieces that were not the showpiece. Game arrived as an estate product or a gift rather than as a purchase, which is why a book of formal menus treats roebuck as an ordinary entrée and offers five ways to serve a cutlet. The name attached to the fillet dish, St. Hubert, is that of the patron saint of hunters, and in a classical kitchen it is the standing signal that a dish belongs to game — another instance of the menu card carrying information that no translation of the words would give you.