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Elk, Venison, or Moose Mulligan
Fifty years ago juicy buffalo humps and antelope steaks were on the Wild West's daily bill of fare; but today you're lucky to get even deer, in one form or another. Elk is excellent, because the meat is finest grained, venison next best, and moose last because the meat is coarse and dark. Besides toothsome venison steaks and saddles, the most characteristic use of any deer, elk, or moose meat is in a luscious, slowly cooked Mulligan:
Cut meat into small pieces, using any part of the animal, season well, sizzle in butter in a skillet, put meat in stew pot, pour hot water in skillet and rinse out all the gravy over the meat. Cook slowly, adding whole onions, tomatoes, carrots, young turnips, fresh corn, string beans, anything you like, just as tramps enrich cat mulligans in their jungles. The stew should simmer for at least 2 hours and be eaten with bonfire-baked cobbler potatoes.
In making Moose Mulligan the meat is usually broiled first, then added to onion browned in hot fat, and the vegetables added, as usual, 30 minutes before meat is done.
A camp stew built on browning, deglazing and long slow simmering. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so the notes below fill in the numbers the original assumes you already know.
- The hinge: deglaze the skilletRinsing the pan with hot water and pouring it over the meat is the whole flavour base of the dish. Do it while the pan is still hot and scrape up every browned scrap; skipping it leaves a thin, watery stew.
- QuantitiesNo amounts are given. Figure 3 lb of boneless meat, about 2 quarts of water or stock, and 2 lb of mixed vegetables; that feeds six to eight generously with potatoes alongside.
- Cut size and cooking time"Small pieces" is not defined; something around 1 to 1 1/2 inch cubes suits the dish. Two hours is the stated minimum for elk or venison shank and shoulder; moose and older animals may want longer before the connective tissue gives way. Test with a fork rather than a clock.
- Add vegetables lateThe instruction to put them in 30 minutes before the meat is done applies to all three versions, not just moose. Whole onions and turnips can go in earlier, but corn and string beans collapse if given the full two hours.
- Keep it below a boil"Cook slowly" is the key word for lean game. A hard boil squeezes the muscle fibres tight and dries them out even in liquid; hold it at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, with the lid ajar.
- FatWild venison, elk and moose carry almost no intramuscular fat, so the butter or "hot fat" is not optional. Beef suet, bacon drippings or a few strips of pork belly added to the pot improve both texture and flavour.
- Cobbler potatoes"Cobbler" is a potato variety (the Irish Cobbler, an early white potato). Here they are baked whole in the coals and embers of a wood fire, skin on, which takes roughly 45 to 60 minutes depending on size. A hot oven is the kitchen substitute.
- Farmed gameSupermarket or farm-raised venison is far more tender and better fattened than the wild meat this recipe was written for. Reduce the simmer to about 90 minutes and check earlier.
Mulligan was the tramp and hobo stew of the American road, a pot into which everyone in the camp threw whatever they had begged or carried, and the reference to "cat mulligans in their jungles" is direct: a "jungle" was the wooded encampment near a rail yard where such cooking was done. The name is generally traced to the generic Irish surname, of a piece with "Mulligan" as a stand-in for any nameless man. Hunting camps borrowed the dish wholesale, since it suited exactly what they had: tough working cuts from a large animal that could not be eaten as steaks, cooked long over a fire while the day's hunting went on. The opening lament about buffalo hump and antelope steaks places the writer in the era after the market-hunting collapse of the late nineteenth century, when wild meat had become a matter of a licence and a season rather than daily fare.