Home › Poultry and Game › Venison Pie
Venison Pie
Simmer until tender small pieces of fresh venison with slices of potato; season with salt and pepper. Put into a baking-dish and cover with a crust made from the drippings from a roast of venison, using twice as much flour as dripping. T
A plain deep-dish game pie with a dripping pastry, written in the shorthand of a book that assumed you already knew how to bake a covered dish. Two things are left out entirely: the oven temperature and the liquid, both of which matter.
- The hinge: keep the filling wetSimmer the venison in just enough water or stock to cover, and carry that liquid into the baking dish with the meat. Venison is very lean and will turn dry and fibrous if the pie bakes on the meat's own juices alone; there should be visible gravy around the potato when you put the crust on.
- Simmering timeSmall pieces of shoulder or neck need roughly one to two hours at a bare simmer to become tender, depending on size. Loin or leg steaks will not benefit from this treatment, so use the working cuts. The recipe simmers the potato with the meat; adding the sliced potato only in the last 20 minutes or so keeps it from disintegrating.
- The dripping crustThe recipe does not say whether "twice as much flour as dripping" is by weight or by volume; taken by volume it works out at about 2 cups flour to 1 cup cooled venison dripping, plus about 1/2 teaspoon salt and just enough ice water to bring it together. Venison fat sets hard and tastes strongly of the roast; if you have none saved, chilled beef suet or lard gives a closer result than butter.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 400F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the crust is set and browned and the gravy bubbles at the vent. The filling is already cooked, so you are only baking the pastry.
- Cut a ventA sealed dripping crust over hot liquid will lift off the filling and go soggy underneath. Slash the top or leave a hole in the center.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper alone is the period instruction and it is thin for game. A bay leaf, a few juniper berries, or an onion in the simmering liquid all sit comfortably within the style, and a spoonful of the flour dredged into the gravy will thicken it to pie consistency.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of trimmed venison and 2 medium potatoes fill a 9-inch deep dish and serve four.
- The stray letterThe recipe as printed ends with a lone "T", apparently the start of a sentence lost in printing or transcription. It may have carried a further instruction, so treat the method as possibly incomplete.
Venison in an American cookbook of this period sat in an awkward place: it was still genuinely wild meat, brought in by a hunting member of the household or bought from a market that dealt in game. That may be why the instructions are so casual about the cut and so specific about the fat: one might infer a cook who had roasted a haunch earlier in the week and saved the drippings, with this pie as what becomes of the tougher trimmings. Pastry made with rendered meat fat rather than butter was ordinary economy in the nineteenth-century kitchen, and pairing the drippings of a roast with the scraps of the same animal is the same logic that produced beef-suet crusts for steak pudding. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a broad domestic readership, keeps its game chapter short and practical.