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Mock Venison Pasty
4763. Stew an ox-cheek for an hour and a half in some good stock; add vegetables and herbs; when quite tender remove the meat from the bones of the cheek, and cut it in slices. Line a dish with puff paste down the sides, and lay the slices in the dish, then strain the gravy and again put it in the stewpan, flavouring it with ketchup and half a tea-cupful of port wine. Pour it over the cheek, cover with paste, and bake. Should the meat be stewed in weak broth or water, some good gravy must be added to it afterwards. If carefully made, it is little inferior to a real venison pasty.
An ox-cheek pie dressed up with port and ketchup to imitate the dark, winey richness of venison. The method is sound; the only figure that needs overturning is the stewing time.
- Stew it far longerNinety minutes will not make ox cheek tender — it is a hard-working muscle laced with collagen and wants three to four hours at a bare simmer. Judge by the meat yielding to a fork, not by the clock, and do this the day before if you can: chilled cheek slices cleanly, warm cheek shreds.
- Sourcing the cheekOx cheek is a butcher's order rather than a supermarket item. One cheek is roughly 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed and will fill a pie for four; ask for the silverskin to be removed or peel it off yourself before stewing.
- Which ketchupIn a book of this date ketchup means mushroom or walnut ketchup — thin, dark, salty, closer to a fermented sauce than to anything sweet. Tomato ketchup will push the pie toward sweetness and dull the game-like effect the recipe is after. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a splash of Worcestershire and a little soy is the nearest common substitute.
- Half a tea-cupful of portA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about a quarter-pint, though the measure was never standard, so this is somewhere around 2 1/2 to 3 fl oz. Add it to the strained gravy and let it boil a minute or two to drive off the raw spirit before it goes over the meat.
- Paste down the sides onlyThe dish is lined at the sides and covered on top, with no pastry on the base — presumably to avoid a sodden or collapsing bottom crust under all that gravy. Use a deep dish, and let the meat and gravy cool before the lid goes on so the butter in the puff paste does not melt out.
- Gravy consistencyStrained stewing liquor is thin. Reduce it hard until it coats a spoon, or slacken a spoonful of flour into it — the pie should be moist, not soupy, or the lid will lift and the filling will boil over.
- OvenBake at 425F for the first 15 to 20 minutes to set and lift the puff paste, then drop to 350F for another 25 to 30 minutes so the filling heats through without the crust scorching. Everything inside is already cooked; the oven is only for the pastry.
- YieldOne cheek with its gravy fills a 2-pint pie dish and serves about four, with mashed potato or a plain green vegetable. Redcurrant jelly on the side reinforces the venison illusion.
"Mock" dishes run right through nineteenth-century English cookery — mock turtle from a calf's head, mock hare from stewed beef, mock brawn, mock goose — and nearly all of them work the same way: a cheap cut is coaxed into the flavour and texture of something expensive. Venison was the aristocratic meat above all others, tied to deer parks and gifts between landed households, and rarely bought over a counter; a venison pasty was accordingly the pie of a great table. Ox cheek was at the other end of the scale, one of the cheapest things a butcher sold, and its heavy gelatine and deep dark colour after long stewing make it a genuinely good stand-in once port and a sharp ketchup have supplied the winey, slightly high edge of hung game. The compiler's closing line — "little inferior to a real venison pasty" — is the standard note of the genre, half boast and half apology, and it tells you how the book expected to be read: by households ambitious enough to want a venison pasty and thrifty enough to make one out of a cheek.