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Cream Sauce for Venison
Pour over the venison, when cooked, one-half pint of cream, and catch it in a dish. Strain the cream into a saucepan, put one tablespoonful of chopped cooked onion into it, and a small piece of butter that has been worked with a little flour; stir the sauce over the fire until boiling, and the flour is cooked, then move the pan to the side and mix in the beaten yolks of two eggs. Stir till well thickened, but do not let it boil again, and serve the sauce in a sauceboat with the venison.
A classic egg-and-cream liaison built on the roasting drippings, in the German-Austrian style Oscar's kitchen leaned on for game. The whole thing lives or dies on not letting it boil after the yolks go in.
- The hinge: no boil after the yolksOnce the beaten yolks are stirred in, keep the pan off direct heat and bring the sauce only to about 180F, stirring constantly. A boil curdles the yolks and the sauce breaks into grains that no amount of whisking will bring back.
- Half a pint of creamOne US cup, or 240 ml. Use heavy cream; modern light cream and half-and-half have less fat and are likelier to break under the heat.
- Pouring cream over the roastThis is a deglazing trick rather than a basting one. The cream is poured over the finished venison so it picks up the browned pan juices, then caught in a dish beneath and strained. A modern equivalent is to lift out the meat, pour the cream into the hot roasting pan, and scrape.
- Butter worked with flourA beurre manie: soft butter and flour kneaded together, usually in roughly equal parts. The recipe quantifies neither, specifying only a small piece of butter with a little flour. Whisk it in in pieces and let the sauce cook a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste before the yolks go anywhere near it.
- Cooked onionThe tablespoon of chopped onion should be softened in butter until translucent and without colour; raw onion added at this stage will taste harsh and never soften in the short cooking that follows.
- Strain twiceThe original strains the cream once, off the meat. Passing the finished sauce through a fine sieve again before it goes into the sauceboat catches any onion and any threads of set yolk.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter of sauce, enough for four to six servings of venison. It will not reheat well — make it while the roast rests and serve at once.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, through the years when American hotel cooking was essentially French with a strong Central European accent, and this sauce shows the accent plainly. Cream sauces finished with egg yolk for roast venison are at home in the German and Austrian game tradition — Rahmsauce served with Rehrücken — though the yolk liaison itself is equally classical French; what differs is the pairing, since the French repertoire more often matched venison with peppery sauce poivrade or a sweet-sharp currant jelly. Venison in a hotel of the 1890s came from the game markets that still operated openly in New York, supplied by commercial hunters; the market hunting that fed those stalls was curtailed within a couple of decades by state game laws and, in 1900, by the federal Lacey Act. The technique itself — slackening a boiling sauce off the fire and binding it with yolks — is one of the oldest in the European kitchen, and the warning not to let it boil again appears in cookbooks for centuries before this one.