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Roast Leg of Venison
Leg of venison
¼ cup butter or oil
Fat salt pork
Flour
Salt and pepper
Wipe carefully, and draw off the dry skin. Lard the lean side of the leg with strips of the pork, then soften the butter, use oil, and rub it over the meat, and dredge with salt, pepper and flour. Lay the leg on the rack in a baking-pan, sprinkle the bottom of the pan with flour, place it in a very hot oven (450° F.) and watch carefully until the flour in the pan is browned, which should be in five minutes. Add boiling water to cover the bottom of the pan. Baste the venison well every fifteen minutes, until the meat is done, renewing the water in the pan as often as necessary. If a double roasting-pan is used, basting is not necessary.
Should the meat be liked very rare, allow one and one-quarter hour of cooking for a ten-pound roast; most tastes require at least twenty-five minutes longer than that. Serve with a gravy made from the juices in the bottom of the pan. Always serve a tart jelly like currant jelly or wild grape or plum jelly with venison.
A straightforward larded roast that assumes a cook standing at the oven with a basting spoon. The one thing to change is the reliance on minutes per pound: venison leg is lean enough that ten minutes past done turns it grey and dry, so cook to internal temperature.
- Use a thermometer, not the clockRare venison is 125-130°F at the thickest part of the leg, medium-rare about 135°F, both measured before a 15-20 minute rest. The recipe's hour and a quarter for a ten-pound roast is aggressive and its "twenty-five minutes longer" will take most legs well past medium.
- The oven temperatureThe recipe gives 450°F and never tells you to lower it. Treat the high heat as a searing stage to set the crust and brown the flour in the pan; once the water goes in, drop the oven to 325-350°F for the remainder or the outer inch will be leather before the centre is warm.
- "Draw off the dry skin"This means the silverskin and the papery membrane over the muscle, not the hide. It does not render and it contracts in the heat, so pare it away with a thin flexible knife before larding.
- Larding, and what to use insteadFat salt pork cut into pencil strips and threaded through the meat with a larding needle bastes it from the inside; the leg has almost no intramuscular fat of its own. Without a needle, bard instead: lay strips of fatty unsmoked bacon or pork back fat over the top and tie them on, removing them for the last 20 minutes to let the surface brown.
- Flour in the panDredging the pan and letting the flour toast at high heat is a shortcut roux that thickens the pan juices as the water is added. Watch it closely at 450°F; scorched flour makes bitter gravy and there is no rescuing it.
- The "double roasting-pan"The "double roasting-pan" -- A covered two-part roaster of the period, which traps steam and makes basting unnecessary, as the recipe says. A modern lidded roaster or a foil tent does the same job, but the meat will steam rather than brown, so uncover it for the final stretch.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a bone-in leg of 8-10 lb will serve roughly 8-12. Carve it thinly across the grain; venison eaten in thick slabs tastes tougher than it is.
- The jelly is not decorationCurrant, wild grape or plum jelly cuts the iron-and-liver note of the meat and stands in for the sweetness venison lacks. A spoonful stirred into the finished pan gravy works as well as a dish of it on the side.
Larding lean game with pork fat is one of the oldest fixes in the European kitchen, and it survives in this early twentieth-century American household book because venison then was still largely a hunter's meat rather than a butcher's: farmed deer was not commercially available in the United States on any scale, and a leg arriving in the kitchen had been shot, hung and skinned by someone the family knew. Hence the instruction to draw off the dry skin and the assumption that the cook is dealing with an animal of unknown age and condition. The mandatory tart jelly is an inheritance from English game cookery, where currant jelly with venison was already conventional by the eighteenth century; American cooks substituted wild grape or plum where currants were scarce. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this alongside its magazines as part of a broad early twentieth-century trade in household compendiums aimed at the middle-class housewife running a kitchen without live-in help.