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Broiled Venison Steak
Venison steak
Currant jelly
Salt and paprika
Possibly olive oil and lemon- Butter juice
This requires about three minutes more time for broiling than beefsteak. If strong, marinate in olive oil and lemon-juice for two hours before cooking. Drain without wiping, and broil over clear, hot coals, turning often to avoid scorching. Serve on a very hot platter, sprinkle with salt and paprika and spread both sides with a mixture of butter and currant jelly, allowing half as much jelly as fat.
PRecipes
A very short set of directions built around one idea: venison is lean, so it needs fat added back at the table. The ingredient list is garbled by the original two-column typesetting and reads more sensibly as venison steak, currant jelly, salt and paprika, butter, and optionally olive oil and lemon juice.
- The hinge: do not overcookVenison has almost no intramuscular fat, so it goes dry and livery well before beef would. Loin and leg steaks are best pulled at rare to medium-rare, around 125-135F, and rested a few minutes; the "three minutes more than beefsteak" in the original assumes a thick steak over coals, not a modern thin cut.
- "Broil over clear, hot coals"Clear coals means a charcoal fire that has burned down past flame to even grey-white ash, giving steady radiant heat and no soot. A hot gas grill or a cast-iron pan preheated until just smoking gives the same result; under an overhead broiler, use the top rack and turn often as instructed.
- The marinadeOlive oil and lemon juice for two hours is a mild treatment aimed at "strong" meat, meaning an older animal or one poorly handled in the field. Farmed venison and young deer need none of it. Going much beyond two hours in acid turns the surface mealy.
- Drain without wipingProbably deliberate, though the recipe does not say why: the film of oil left on the meat helps keep it from sticking and encourages colour. If you are cooking in a pan rather than over coals, blot the surface lightly instead, or the oil will smoke and the crust will be spotty.
- Butter and currant jellyHalf as much jelly as butter, mashed together cold and spread on the hot steak, where it melts into a sweet-tart sauce. Red currant jelly is the traditional choice and is still sold; tart redcurrant or lingonberry preserve works the same way. Reckon on about 2 tablespoons butter to 1 of jelly for two steaks.
- PaprikaIn an American book of this period this most likely means a mild, Hungarian-style paprika, used for colour and gentle fragrance rather than heat. Smoked or hot paprika will read quite differently against the jelly.
- The very hot platterPractical rather than decorative: a cold plate chills a very lean steak quickly and will set the butter-and-jelly mixture into a paste before it reaches the table.
- YieldNone given. Allow 6-8 oz of boneless steak per person; the butter-jelly mixture above dresses two portions.
Currant jelly with venison is a long-established English-American pairing for game, often traced back to the sweet-sour sauces served with roast deer in earlier centuries, and by the nineteenth century red currant jelly was a conventional accompaniment to game birds and joints. The caveat about meat that is "strong" points to venison from a hunted animal -- the flavour of a rutting buck, or of a carcass carried home warm -- and an oil-and-acid soak was one common domestic remedy. Broiling over clear coals also fits a period in which solid-fuel cookery was still usual and a cook was expected to judge a fire by eye. Paprika appears with increasing frequency in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward.