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Braised Venison Cutlets
Lard the cutlets and put them into a stewpan with a bunch of thyme and parsley, two carrots and one sliced onion. Pour in a small quantity of gravy and braise the cutlets for twenty minutes. When cooked brush them over with a little melted glaze, arrange them on a hot dish, and serve them with a sauceboatful of piquant sauce.
A short professional note rather than a full recipe: Oscar assumes a kitchen with stock, meat glaze and sauces already standing. Read it as a method for cutlets you have to keep moist, because venison has almost no internal fat.
- Larding, and what to do insteadLarding means threading strips of chilled pork fat or fatback through the meat with a larding needle. Without a needle, bard the cutlets instead: tie a thin sheet of fatback or a few rashers of unsmoked bacon over each one, which does much the same job in a shallow braise.
- "Gravy" is stockIn kitchen usage of this period gravy means a strong brown stock or reduced jus, not thickened pan gravy. The recipe asks only for a small quantity: enough to keep the pan moist and braise the cutlets rather than submerge them.
- GlazeGlaze is glace de viande, brown stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets to a rubbery block when cold. A tablespoon melted and brushed on gives the shine Oscar wants; a commercial demi-glace concentrate is the closest shortcut.
- Piquant sauceSauce piquante of the era is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar-and-shallot reduction and finished with chopped gherkins, capers and herbs. Any sharp brown sauce serves; a currant or juniper sauce is the more usual modern partner.
- Twenty minutes is for thin cutletsThe timing suits relatively thin cutlets cut from the loin or leg. Venison loin is commonly taken to 130-135F internal for medium rare, though 145F is the usual food-safety figure for whole cuts; cooked well past that it dries out no matter how much fat is tied to it. Cuts from the shoulder need an hour or more and are not what this recipe is for.
- The aromatics are flavour, not garnishThe thyme, parsley, carrot and onion go in to perfume the braising liquid. Strain them out, reduce the liquid hard, and either add it to the sauce or use it as the glaze.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel when game was still a standard luxury on American hotel menus, and venison in this book means wild deer brought in during the legal season. Market hunting was still legal when the book appeared in 1896; it was only later curtailed by state game laws and then by the Lacey Act of 1900 and the era of federal enforcement that followed, and the venison a cook buys today is farmed, usually red deer or fallow, milder and more consistently tender than the animals Oscar's kitchen handled. The recipe's insistence on larding and a brushed glaze reflects the older reality, since wild deer taken late in the season carry almost no fat and dry out in minutes. The style of the instruction itself, terse and assuming a well-stocked garde-manger, is the classic French brigade manner associated with Oscar's generation of American hotel cooking.