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Roast Leg of Venison
Wipe carefully, draw off the dry skin. Lard the lean side of the leg; then soften one-quarter of a cup of butter, rub it over the meat, and dredge with salt, pepper, and flour. Lay the leg on the rack in the baking-pan, sprinkle the bottom of the pan with flour, place it in a very hot oven, 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, and after roasting fifteen minutes, baste the venison well, and repeat the basting every fifteen minutes until the meat is done, renewing the water in the pan as often as necessary. Should the meat be liked very rare, allow for a ten-pound roast, one and onequarter hour of cooking; but most tastes require at least fifteen minutes longer than that. Serve with a gravy made from the juices in the bottom of the pan, the same as that for roast beef, sending the gravy to the table in a gravy-boat. Always serve currant jelly with venison. The oven must be very hot the first half hour, and after that the heat may be lessened somewhat.
A straightforward high-heat roast written for a lean wild haunch. The instructions assume a cook who knows the pan-gravy routine, so the useful additions are temperature numbers and a thermometer.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no figures. "Very hot" is usually read as somewhere around 450-475F for the first half hour, enough to brown the flour in the pan and set a crust; "lessened somewhat" as roughly 325-350F for the remainder.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockThe stated 1¼ hours for ten pounds is roughly 7-8 minutes per pound, which suits a rare roast on a bone-in leg. Pull it at 125-130F at the thickest point for rare, 135F for medium-rare; venison is lean enough that anything past 140F turns dry and livery.
- LardingThreading strips of pork fat or bacon through the lean side with a larding needle is not decorative — a wild haunch carries almost no intramuscular fat. If you have no larding needle, bard instead: tie sheets of fatback or thin-sliced bacon over the surface and remove them for the last twenty minutes to let the meat colour.
- "Draw off the dry skin"Most likely the dried outer membrane and silverskin over the muscle. Slide a thin knife under it and strip it off; it will not render and it makes carving unpleasant.
- The flour in the panScattering dry flour on the pan bottom and letting it toast for five minutes is the period method of building a browned roux in place. Watch it — in a very hot oven it goes from nut-brown to burnt quickly, and burnt flour ruins the gravy.
- Basting and waterKeep only a shallow film of boiling water in the pan. Too much and the underside steams; too little and the browned flour scorches while the oven is at its hottest.
- RestingThe original says nothing about it. Rest a ten-pound leg 20 minutes under loose foil before carving, and make the gravy in that window.
- SourcingFarmed venison is milder, more evenly fatted and sold in leg or boned haunch; a 10 lb bone-in leg is a large animal's, so scale the timing if yours is 4-6 lb. Wild venison should be well hung and trimmed of any bloodshot tissue.
- YieldA ten-pound bone-in leg serves 12-14 with the gravy and jelly.
Venison in an American cookbook of this period sits at the hinge between wild game and market meat, at a time when market hunting was collapsing under new state game laws. The currant jelly the recipe insists on is the older half of the tradition: sharp fruit preserves with rich, dark, lean meat is a European convention of long standing, carried into English and then American cookery, and by the late nineteenth century red currant jelly with venison and mutton was treated as a fixed pairing rather than a choice. The technique — dry flour browned in the pan bottom, boiling water added, repeated basting, gravy sent up in a boat — is the standard roast-beef method of the book applied unchanged to game, with larding added because venison has almost none of beef's fat to protect it.