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Venison Pastry
Use for this neck, breast, flank and other portions that are not suitable for roasting. Wash with vinegar, rub with sugar and hang in cool, airy place as long as possible. Examine every day and wipe night and morning with dry cloth. When it is to be used sponge with lukewarm water and dry with cloth. Bone it and cut meat free from skin into pieces 2 ins. square. Parboil till meat begins to be tender, then season well and lay in baking dish of which sides have been lined with good pastry. Arrange pieces, fat and lean together, adding more seasoning if needed and dot well with bits of butter and enough stock to cover bottom of dish well. Cover with thick crust and bake till crust is thoroughly done. While it is being baked put all bones and trimmings in covered stewpan with mace, pepper, salt and cold water to cover pieces. Simmer till all goodness is out of the bones and water reduced one-half. Strain, cool and remove the fat. When pie is done heat up gravy with lemon juice. Put funnel through the hole in crust and pour gravy in. Good either hot or cold.
The pie itself is a plain baked game pie, but it is built on a conditioning method that has no place in a modern kitchen: raw venison washed with vinegar, rubbed with sugar and hung at unmeasured room conditions for an unspecified number of days. A current venison pie recipe should be used instead.
- The hanging step is the failure"Hang in cool, airy place as long as possible" gives no temperature and no time limit. Controlled dry-ageing of game is done at a measured 34-40F with monitored humidity; a cool larder in an unheated house may sit anywhere from near-freezing to well above 50F depending on the season, and above roughly 40F surface spoilage organisms multiply freely on exposed muscle and bone.
- Vinegar and sugar preserve nothingA vinegar wipe lowers surface pH only briefly and superficially, and the sugar rub was presumably meant to counter taint rather than to cure. Neither is a preservative at these quantities, so the meat is hanging unprotected. Wiping it night and morning with a dry cloth spreads whatever has established itself over the whole surface.
- Cut surfaces and bone-in flankNeck, breast and flank are the pieces with the most exposed cut surface, seam fat and connective tissue, and the recipe leaves them on the bone throughout the hang. Deep tissue along bone is exactly where anaerobic spoilage, including gas-forming clostridia, develops out of sight, and "sponge with lukewarm water" before boning does not address it.
- Handling after the hangThe meat is boned and cubed by hand after days at ambient temperature, then parboiled only "till meat begins to be tender." Any surface contamination is redistributed through the filling at that point, and a partial parboil is not a reliable kill step for a large mass of cubed meat.
- The gravy and cold servingA separate bone stock is strained, cooled, reheated and poured through the crust vent into a finished pie, which is then "good either hot or cold." A meat pie filled with warm liquid and left to cool slowly in its own crust spends a long stretch in the range where bacteria grow fastest, and the original gives no instruction to chill it.
- What is worth keepingThe structural ideas here are sound and survive in modern game cookery: braise the tough cuts before they go under a crust, dot the filling with fat because venison has almost none of its own, and use the bones for a reduced stock finished with lemon. Those belong to a recipe that starts with properly chilled, correctly aged venison.