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Roast Kid with Venison Sauce
This dish is very excellent with mutton instead of kid; the meat tastes like venison if this recipe is followed: Put the meat, say a shoulder of mutton, to soak in a bottle of red wine, with a sliced carrot, thyme, bay-leaves (4), six cloves, fifteen peppercorns and a teaspoonful of vinegar, for two hours. Then bring the liquor to the boil and just before it is boiling pour it over and over the meat. Do this pouring over of hot liquor for two days. Then put the meat in the oven with butter, pepper, and salt, till it is cooked. Sauce: Brown some onions in butter and pour in your liquor, but without the carrot. Let it simmer for three-quarters of an hour, and pour it through a sieve. Roll a nut of butter in flour and add little by little the liquor you have from the meat, then a coffee-spoonful of meat extract and two lumps of sugar. This sauce ought to be quite thick. It is served with the meat.
A mock-venison marinade of the old school: the wine bath is reheated and poured back over the meat repeatedly for two days, which both tenderises and pushes the flavour toward game. Most of the work is in the waiting, and the sauce is a straightforward beurre-manié.
- The hinge: keep it cold between scaldingsThe two days of repeated hot-liquor basting would have been done in a cold larder rather than a warm kitchen. Do the marinating in the refrigerator in a covered non-reactive dish, and return the meat and liquor there promptly each time after pouring; two days of raw meat at room temperature is the one part of this method that does not translate.
- Kid, and what to use insteadKid is young goat, sold at halal and Caribbean butchers and worth seeking out. The recipe itself offers the substitution: a shoulder of mutton, or in practice a 3-4 lb bone-in lamb shoulder, which is what most cooks will end up roasting.
- A bottle of red wine750 ml of something dry and sturdy. It need not be good, but it should not be sweet, since the sauce is finished with sugar.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A shoulder of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, roughly 25-30 minutes per pound, and it is better taken to the point where it pulls easily from the bone than to a pink medium.
- Nut of butter, rolled in flourAbout 1 tablespoon of butter worked with an equal spoonful of flour — beurre manié. The recipe adds the strained liquor to it little by little; work the liquor in gradually rather than dropping the whole lump into the pan, or it will sit unincorporated.
- Meat extractLiebig's or Bovril, both on sale when the book was compiled. A coffee-spoon is smaller than a teaspoon, so start at about half a teaspoon; the extract is very salty and the sauce reduces further.
- Two lumps of sugarPeriod sugar lumps run to roughly a teaspoon each, so about 2 teaspoons in total. This is the sweet-sour balance that makes the mutton read as venison, along with the teaspoon of vinegar in the marinade.
- Strain, then reduceThe onions simmer in the marinade for three-quarters of an hour and are then sieved out; press them well to get the body. If the finished sauce is thin, reduce it further rather than adding more flour — the recipe is emphatic that it should be quite thick.
- YieldA shoulder of lamb or a kid shoulder feeds four to six, with enough sauce for all of it.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it carries the marks of that origin: dishes remembered rather than measured, with coffee-spoons and nuts of butter standing in for weights. Marinating cheap or mature meat in spiced red wine to make it taste like game is a very old European economy, related to the marinades used for civet and for German Sauerbraten, and the recipe has one repeatedly reheat the marinade and pour it back over the joint. The book also offers mutton as a substitute for kid.