Home › Wild Meat › Jerked Venison
Jerked Venison
This recipe comes right down from Indian days. We always had jerked venison in a stone crock down cellar in the winter, and though we never made a dish out of it, you should be able to use it any way you would use dried beef. It tastes best, however, shaved paper thin and eaten with an apple, as a snack. To make jerked venison you need round, chunky pieces of venison, not long and stringy pieces. Make a brine strong enough to hold up an egg, and leave the venison pieces in it 24-36 hours. Stir occasionally to be sure each piece soaks evenly. Then tie each piece with string and suspend the strings from a rope stretched across the kitchen, in a warm, dry place. They should hang until thoroughly dry-at least a week. (Avis De Voto in America Cooks.)
This is a pre-refrigeration preservation method, and the reason it cannot be reproduced is the drying step rather than any single ingredient. The notes below explain where the process falls outside current food-safety limits; a tested modern jerky or cured-meat recipe should be used instead.
- Why the hanging step failsWhole chunks of venison suspended in a warm kitchen for a week spend days in the temperature range where Salmonella, pathogenic E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus multiply. Surface drying can seal moisture inside a thick, chunky piece, so the interior stays wet and warm long after the outside feels dry.
- No heat step at any pointThe meat is never brought to a temperature that destroys bacteria. Drying alone does not do it: dehydration slows growth but leaves surviving organisms viable, and toxin already produced by S. aureus is heat-stable and will not be undone later.
- An unmeasured cure"Strong enough to hold up an egg" describes a heavily salted brine, but it is a folk test, not a measurement, and salt concentration in the brine tells you nothing about how much salt penetrated the centre of a chunk in 24-36 hours. Safe curing depends on weighed salt against weighed meat.
- No nitrite, and thick piecesThere is no curing salt here, and the recipe specifically calls for round, chunky pieces rather than thin strips. Slow-drying thick, nitrite-free meat at ambient temperature is a situation in which Clostridium botulinum can be a concern in the anaerobic interior, alongside the more likely bacterial hazards.
- Wild game adds a second problemVenison from a field-dressed animal carries whatever the gut spill and the handling introduced, and in some regions wild cervids also raise questions that no home process addresses. Commercial venison and home-shot venison are not equivalent starting materials.
- What the storage tells youThe stone crock down cellar was doing real work: the finished jerky was kept at cellar temperature through the winter, not on a warm shelf. That storage condition is part of the original method.
Jerky descends from Quechua ch'arki, dried meat, which reached English through Spanish charqui; the technique of drying lean meat in sun, wind and smoke is far older than any written recipe for it and was practised across the Andes and the North American plains alike. The note that it "comes right down from Indian days" reflects how the method was understood in the households the writer grew up in - as an inheritance rather than an invention - and the comparison to dried beef is telling, since chipped or dried beef was the store-bought equivalent most readers would have had in the pantry. The attribution is to Avis DeVoto, best remembered as Julia Child's correspondent, who championed the Mastering the Art of French Cooking manuscript and brought it to Knopf, where Judith Jones was its editor; she writes here in the regional-contributions vein of America Cooks, a book built from family recipes gathered state by state. Eating it shaved paper thin with an apple places it firmly as a winter snack from a cold cellar, not a dish for the table.