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Baked Saddle of Venison
The saddle of venison is the double loin. Have the ribs cut off close to use for soup, stew or pastry. Wipe all the hairs off with a soft cloth dampened in warm water, tie thickly-buttered paper over the upper part of the saddle, lay it on a rack in a bakingpan and quickly brown the joint in a hot oven; then remove the paper and season with salt and pepper. Put into the drippingpan one teaspoonful each of butter, boiling water and red currant jelly, and baste the venison with this sauce until it is entirely brown, then serve hot with the sauce in a sauceboat.
Saddle of Venison, Polish Style Prepare a saddle or haunch of a buck (one that has not been fattened being preferable), place in a stewpan, add two quarts of cooked marinade stock. Allow it to remain in this for four hours, turning it frequently; take it out, allow it to drain, lard the fillets with bacon, place it in a braisingpan and moisten to half the height of the meat with broth and a small quantity of its marinade. Braise it on a moderate fire and baste frequently. Dish it up, garnish with a pile of round truffles and two mushrooms stuffed along the sides, and a pile of sourkraut at each end. Pour over a little brown sauce that has been prepared with the meat, and serve the balance of the sauce in a sauceboat.
Two treatments of the same cut: a plain buttered-paper roast and a braise with a cooked marinade. Both assume a butcher who will hand you a whole saddle and a cook who knows when the meat is done by feel.
- The cutA saddle is the unsplit double loin, both sides still joined by the backbone, typically 5-8 lb on a farmed deer. Ask for it bone-in with the ribs and flaps trimmed off; most suppliers will otherwise sell you two separate boneless loins, which cook far faster.
- Oven temperatures"A hot oven" for the initial browning is conventionally read as somewhere around 450F. The recipe does not itself call for lowering the heat once the paper comes off, though a moderate oven of about 375F suits the basting stage. "A moderate fire" for the Polish braise means gentle, steady heat -- the barest simmer on the stovetop, or a low oven if you prefer to move it there.
- The hinge: internal temperatureVenison loin has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and liverish past medium. Pull it at 125-130F in the thickest part and rest it 15 minutes. The recipe's instruction to baste "until it is entirely brown" will overshoot badly on a modern, lean animal if taken literally.
- Buttered paperUse parchment, buttered heavily, or a sheet of thin-cut fatback tied over the loins. Its job is to keep the exposed surface from scorching while the interior warms; foil traps steam and defeats the purpose.
- The basting sauce quantitiesOne teaspoonful each of butter, water and currant jelly is very little liquid for basting a whole saddle, and may be a misprint for tablespoons. For a saddle of this size you will want more: something like 3-4 tablespoons butter, half a cup of water or stock and a quarter cup of currant jelly, adjusting as it reduces.
- Marinade stockThe recipe calls for a cooked marinade, meaning one simmered and then cooled before it touches the meat; a typical period version would be built on wine or vinegar with aromatic vegetables and spices. Two quarts covers a whole saddle. Marinate in the refrigerator rather than four hours on the counter, and turn it as directed.
- LardingLarding needles are rare now. Cut bacon or fatback into narrow strips and push them into the loins with a thin boning knife, or simply bard the whole saddle with sheets of fat tied on with butcher's twine.
- Sourkraut and trufflesSauerkraut in an older anglicised spelling; use drained, gently braised kraut rather than raw from the jar. For "round truffles," whole small truffles, or sauteed button mushrooms, serve the same visual purpose.
- YieldA 6 lb bone-in saddle serves eight generously as a centrepiece course, less if you are carving thick. Save the ribs and trimmings, as the recipe says, for stock.
The saddle was the ceremonial venison cut of the nineteenth-century hotel dining room: carved at the table, served with currant jelly, and priced accordingly. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel and the book's compiler, worked in the years when American game was passing out of the wild market and onto the farm, and the note to prefer a buck "that has not been fattened" belongs to the older, hunted world, where the cook expected lean, strong meat and used marinades and larding to manage it. The pairing of venison with red currant jelly is generally traced to German and English practice, where sharp fruit conserves stood in for the sauces poivrades of French cookery; the "Polish style" version, with its cooked marinade, braise and sauerkraut at either end of the platter, reflects the Central European repertoire that grand-hotel cooking absorbed wholesale and labelled by nationality. Both are period pieces in another sense too: the Lacey Act of 1900 and the state game laws that followed ended the commercial sale of wild venison in the United States, so the venison that reaches a restaurant table now comes from other sources.