Home › Recipes For The Chafing-Dish › Venison Cutlets with Apples
Venison Cutlets with Apples
Wipe, core, and cut four apples in one-fourth inch slices. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, and add one-third cup Port wine; cover, and let stand thirty minutes. Drain, and sauté in butter. Cut a slice of venison one-half inch thick in cutlets. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook three or four minutes in a hot chafing-dish, using just enough butter to prevent sticking. Remove from dish; then melt three tablespoons butter, add wine drained from apples, and twelve candied cherries cut in halves. Reheat cutlets in sauce, and serve with apples.
A chafing-dish supper dish that depends on speed: venison loin has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and liverish the moment it passes medium-rare. Everything else here is assembly.
- The hinge: three or four minutes means three or four minutesHalf-inch cutlets need roughly 90 seconds a side over real heat and should come off at 130-135F internal. Reheating in the sauce cooks them further, so pull them early and keep the sauce below a simmer.
- Chafing-dish heatA spirit lamp or modern fuel canister under a blazer pan runs well below a skillet on a burner. Preheat the empty blazer for several minutes before the meat goes in, cook two cutlets at a time, and accept that a heavy pan on the stove will sear better if colour matters to you.
- Powdered sugarIn this book this is a fine-ground granulated sugar, distinct from the finer confectioners' sugar. About two tablespoons over four apples is enough; the point is to draw juice out so the Port can get in.
- ApplesChoose a firm variety that holds its shape when sauteed.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households around 1900, and Fannie Farmer gave it a chapter of its own: the apparatus let a hostess cook at the table, without servants, for late suppers after the theatre or for small informal groups. The dishes in that chapter are accordingly quick, showy and built on ingredients already trimmed and portioned before the lamp is lit. Venison in this context is a token of the sporting household — a haunch or saddle sent from the country, or bought from a game dealer, at a time when wild game still moved through American markets fairly freely before state and federal restrictions on its sale tightened in the following decades. The Port, candied cherries and sauteed apples follow the long European convention of pairing game with something sweet and acidic to offset its leanness, a habit generally traced back through French and German cookery well before it reached Boston.