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Roast Leg of Venison
Prepare and cook as Roast Lamb, allowing less time that it may be cooked rare.
A one-line cross-reference that assumes you have already read the roast lamb entry a few pages earlier. The whole instruction rests on the word rare: a leg of venison has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and liver-flavoured the moment it passes medium.
- The hinge: internal temperatureCook to 125-130F at the thickest part of the leg and pull it out; carryover will bring it to about 135F. Farmer had no thermometer in mind, but this is the one number that decides whether the roast is good.
- What "cook as Roast Lamb" meantFarmer's method is to dredge the meat with salt, pepper and flour, put it in a hot oven to sear and brown, then reduce the heat and baste every ten minutes or so with the fat in the pan. She gives no thermometer readings for the oven; the modern equivalents are an interpretation, not her instruction.
- TimingHer lamb allowance is roughly 15 minutes per pound. "Less time" for venison means about 10-12 minutes per pound for a bone-in leg, but weight is a poor guide with an oddly shaped haunch; go by the thermometer.
- FatVenison supplies almost none of its own. Bard the leg with sheets of pork fat or bacon tied on, or rub it heavily with butter, and keep basting. Without added fat the surface scorches before the middle warms.
- Farmed versus wildSupermarket or butcher venison is farmed red deer or fallow, mild and reliably tender. A wild deer taken late in the season is leaner, stronger, and worth marinating in red wine and aromatics for a day; an old animal's leg is better braised than roasted.
- RestingTwenty minutes under loose foil before carving, longer than you would give a leg of lamb. A lean roast loses a great deal of liquid if opened straight from the oven.
- SauceA standard accompaniment of the period is currant jelly, either served alongside or melted into the deglazed pan juices with a splash of port. Mint sauce belonged to lamb rather than to venison. The recipe itself specifies nothing.
- YieldA bone-in leg of farmed venison runs roughly 5-8 lb and serves eight to twelve. A wild haunch varies a great deal with the size and age of the animal, so weigh what you have rather than assuming.
Venison sits in the Game chapter of Fannie Farmer's 1896 book alongside grouse, quail, wild duck and reed birds, in an era when American cooks still bought game from market men rather than shot it themselves. By the 1890s wild deer had been hunted to near-vanishing across much of New England, and the venison reaching a Boston kitchen was more likely to have travelled by rail from Maine, the Adirondacks or further west; the state game laws that would restore the herds, and the market-hunting bans that followed, were only then being written. Farmer's terseness here is telling. She expected the leg to be handled like any other roast joint, distinguished only by its leanness, and she gave the whole matter one sentence erged, one might guess, to a household repertoire she assumed her readers already had. The insistence on rare cooking is the older instinct still intact: venison has been treated as a meat to undercook since long before anyone measured its fat content, and the currant-jelly pairing that goes with it is often said to descend from English country-house cooking.