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Venison Cutlets
Clean and trim slices of venison cut from loin. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, brush over with melted butter or olive oil, and roll in soft stale bread crumbs. Place in a broiler and broil five minutes, or sauté in butter. Serve with Port Wine Sauce.
A spare Fannie Farmer formula that assumes you know what venison loin is and how not to overcook it. The hinge is doneness: venison loin has almost no intramuscular fat and goes dry and livery the moment it passes medium rare.
- The cut"Slices from the loin" means the backstrap, cut across into medallions; the recipe gives no thickness, but something around three-quarters of an inch suits the five-minute timing. Trim off every trace of silverskin, which will not render and pulls the cutlet into a curl as it cooks.
- Five minutes, and whyFive minutes total under a fierce fire should bring a medallion of that thickness to about rare; thicker cuts or a lukewarm broiler will leave the interior cold, and a much longer time will leave it grey and tough.
- Soft stale bread crumbsNot the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Take day-old white bread with the crust removed and rub or pulse it into soft flakes; they brown quickly and stay tender.
- Broiler versus panA broiler of this period could mean a hinged wire gridiron held over coals, with heat close on both sides. A modern overhead broiler, fully preheated with the rack near the element, will scorch loose crumbs before the meat is done, so the sauté option in butter is the easier of the two to control.
- Butter that will not burnIf you sauté, use clarified butter or butter cut with a spoonful of oil. Whole butter at the heat needed to brown crumbs quickly will blacken.
- Wild versus farmedFarmed venison is milder and slightly fatter than wild deer and needs no soaking or marinade. Wild loin from an older animal is leaner still and benefits from resting five minutes off the heat before slicing.
- Port Wine SauceCross-referenced to a separate entry elsewhere in the book, which has not been reproduced here. A modern reduction of stock and port, finished with butter, sits in the same place on the plate.
- YieldAllow two medallions, about 6 oz of trimmed loin, per person. The recipe as written gives no number and scales directly.
Venison sat in the game chapter of American cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and market hunting was being restricted state by state in roughly the years Fannie Farmer was writing. The treatment here -- crumbed, broiled fast, sauced with port and jelly -- follows the English game tradition, where sweet-tart accompaniments have long been paired with dark, lean meat. The word cutlet in this period generally means a small flat slice cooked quickly rather than necessarily a bone-in chop, which fits the use of loin here.