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Saddle of Venison
Clean and lard a saddle of venison. Cook same as Saddle of Mutton. Serve with Currant Jelly Sauce.
Fannie Farmer's cross-referenced instructions assume a cook who knows the mutton roast by heart. The essentials transfer, but venison is far leaner than mutton and punishes the long, well-basted roasting the original implies.
- What a saddle isThe unsplit loin section: both loins and the backbone between them, ribs trimmed short, taken from behind the shoulder to the hips. Expect 6-10 lb bone-in from farmed deer, less from a small wild one. A butcher will need notice; a pair of boneless loins is the usual substitute.
- Larding, and whether to botherLarding means threading strips of chilled salt pork or fatback through the meat with a larding needle, which is the whole point of the direction here: venison has almost no intramuscular fat. Barding, tying sheets of fatback or bacon over the top, does most of the same work with none of the equipment.
- The oven the mutton recipe meansThe mutton method starts in a hot oven to sear the surface and finishes at a moderate heat; Farmer gives no numbers, and modern cooks read that as roughly 450-475F falling to about 350F. For venison keep the searing stage short, 10-15 minutes, and drop the heat as soon as the fat colors.
- Doneness is the hingeThis is the one place the old timing must be overturned. Venison loin is done at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare. Past 140F it turns dry and liverish no matter how heavily it was larded. Timing varies too much with the thickness of the joint to give per-pound figures; use a thermometer rather than the clock, and rest it 15 minutes under foil.
- DredgingThe mutton method calls for rubbing the meat with salt, pepper and flour before it goes in. The flour browns into the drippings and gives the pan gravy body; skip it only if you intend to serve the currant sauce alone.
- Currant Jelly SauceSauces of this name are essentially red currant jelly stirred into a brown sauce, that is stock thickened with butter and flour; some versions add a spoonful of wine. Bottled red currant jelly is still sold; cranberry is the common stand-in, though it is sweeter and coarser.
- Farmed versus wildFarmed venison is milder, fattier and more evenly tender than the market game of 1896. A wild saddle from an older animal benefits from a day in buttermilk or a wine marinade, which the original takes for granted no more than it takes anything else for granted.
- Yield and carvingA bone-in saddle serves 6-8. Carve in long strips parallel to the backbone, or free each loin whole and slice it across into medallions.
The saddle is among the grandest of the game roasts in Farmer's book, and its brevity here is a sign of how routine venison still was on a good American table in the 1890s: deer came to city markets in season alongside grouse, quail and wild duck, and a cook could be told simply to treat the saddle like mutton and move on. The cut takes its name from its resemblance to a saddle, the double loin section sitting where a saddle would; English kitchens had used the term for mutton and venison well before American cookbooks existed. Larding with salt pork was a standard answer to a lean joint in an era when meat was generally cooked further than we would now and needed all the internal fat it could be given. The currant jelly is the older tradition still, part of the long-standing English pairing of sharp-sweet fruit with venison that also lies behind Cumberland sauce; as market game gave way to wildlife protection laws in the following decades, the sauce outlasted the roast it was made for and is now more often met with lamb or turkey.