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Marinade, Cooked
Two tablespoons of butter, two of chopped bacon, three each of chopped onion, carrot and celery; one clove of garlic; one bay leaf, and one sprig each of thyme and parsley. Cook slowly twenty minutes; add three gills of vinegar, one of water, one teaspoon of salt and one-half teaspoon of pepper; simmer twenty minutes, strain and cool. Use to season game, poultry and fish either before or after cooking.
A classic French marinade cuite "'"cooked, strained and cooled before it ever touches meat. The measurements are workable once the gills are converted.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Three gills of vinegar is 1 1/2 cups and one gill of water is 1/2 cup, so 2 cups of liquid go into the pan; expect rather less than that after the twenty-minute simmer and straining.
- The vegetable quantities"Three each" means three tablespoons of chopped onion, carrot and celery, matching the two tablespoons each of butter and bacon. This is a small batch; scale up in proportion for a whole leg of venison.
- Cook slowly, do not brownThe first twenty minutes is best read as a sweat rather than a saute. Keep the heat low enough that the vegetables soften and give up their moisture without colouring.
- Vinegar strengthVinegars vary in acidity and a sharp modern 5 percent vinegar may bite harder than the recipe intends. A red wine vinegar cut with a little more water, or half vinegar and half dry red wine, gives a gentler result for game.
- Cool it completelyThe instruction to cool is the hinge. Warm marinade sitting on raw game holds the meat in the temperature range where bacteria multiply; chill the strained liquid thoroughly and marinate in the refrigerator, not on a larder shelf.
- BaconChopped bacon here is for fat and savour, in the role of French lard de poitrine. Unsmoked streaky or pancetta suits game better than heavily smoked supermarket rashers.
- Marinade that has held raw meatIf you use it before cooking, the liquid has been in contact with raw flesh. Boil it hard before it goes into a sauce, or discard it.
- Using it after cookingThe recipe allows the marinade to be used after cooking as well, presumably spooned over the cooked meat or fish.
- Yield and keepingRather under 2 cups once simmered and strained, enough for a brace of birds or a small joint. Refrigerated in a clean jar it should hold several days; the acidity helps, but the bacon fat and vegetable matter do not keep indefinitely.
Cooked marinades belong to the game cookery of the French kitchen, where a distinction was drawn between the marinade crue (raw "'" vinegar, wine and aromatics simply mixed) and the marinade cuite, in which the vegetables and herbs are first sweated in fat and the acid then simmered into them. Cooking the vegetables extracts more flavour. The venerable purpose of such a marinade was to tame venison, hare and older wildfowl "'" meat that arrived hung, strong and often tough "'" and the mixture of butter, bacon, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, bay, thyme and parsley here is essentially a mirepoix with a bouquet garni, the standard aromatic base of nineteenth-century professional cookery. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, also issued a cook book, and it includes a French cooked marinade in its sauces chapter.