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Mock Venison
1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup water or stock 1 tablespoon currant jelly 1 tablespoon bottled meat sauce Brown the flour in the butter; add the water or stock, stirring constantly; then add the jelly and meat sauce and bring to a boil. Cut the cold meat into thin slices; heat them thoroughly in the sauce and serve.
A sauce recipe in all but name: the point is to make yesterday's cold roast taste like game. Two things are unstated, and both matter.
- How much meatThe original never says. A cup of sauce coats roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of sliced cold roast, which serves three or four. Slice it thin, no more than 1/8 inch, so it warms through before it toughens.
- Bottled meat sauceIn a book of this period that means Worcestershire, Harvey's sauce, or a mushroom ketchup — a thin, dark, salty-sour condiment. Use Worcestershire; a tablespoon is enough to season a cup of sauce, so do not substitute a thick modern steak sauce measure for measure.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the traditional accompaniment to venison, and a large part of why the dish is called mock. Redcurrant is sharper than grape or apple jelly; if you use one of those, add a squeeze of lemon to keep the sauce from turning merely sweet.
- Browning the flourThis is a brown roux and it needs time — five to eight minutes over medium heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell. Rushing it leaves a raw-flour taste that the jelly cannot cover.
- Do not boil the meatBring the sauce to a boil first, then drop the heat before the slices go in. Cold cooked meat simmered in liquid goes grey and stringy within a few minutes; two or three minutes off the boil is all it wants.
- Stock over waterWater and a tablespoon of Worcestershire will not carry the sauce on their own. Beef or lamb stock, or any pan juices saved from the original roast, makes the difference between a gravy and a thin brown liquid.
- ServingMashed or boiled potatoes, and something plainly cooked and green. The sauce is sweet-sharp and does not want a second sweet element on the plate.
"Mock" dishes run all through Anglo-American cookery — mock turtle, mock duck, mock apple pie — and they work in one of two directions: either an expensive ingredient is imitated by a cheap one, or a cheap one is dressed up to read as expensive. This is the second kind. Venison was the food of the deer park and the hunting season, and what marked it at table as much as the meat itself was the accompaniment: a dark, well-browned sauce cut with red currant jelly. Borrow the sauce and the resemblance follows, which is why a plate of Monday's cold mutton can be sent in under a game bird's name. The cook's real problem, in other words, was disguise.