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Fried Venison Chops
Season the chops with pepper and salt, place them in a fryingpan with a lump of butter, and fry over a clear fire, turning them frequently. Trim some mushrooms, put them in a small saucepan, pour over one-half pint of brown gravy, season to taste with salt and pepper, and let them simmer gently while the chops are cooking. In the course of twenty minutes the chops should be cooked; then put them on a hot dish, pour the gravy over them, and serve without delay.
A hotel-kitchen shorthand that assumes a coal range and a saucepan of brown sauce already standing at the back of the stove. Two things need translating: the sauce and the cooking time.
- Twenty minutes is far too longLoin or rib chops from farmed venison are lean and finely grained; twenty minutes in a pan leaves them grey and dry. Chops an inch thick want about 3 to 4 minutes a side over good heat, to an internal 130-135F, then a five-minute rest. The frequent turning in the original is sound practice and worth keeping.
- "A clear fire"On a coal range this meant coals burned down past the smoke to a steady red glow — the equivalent of medium-high heat with no flare-ups. A heavy cast-iron or carbon-steel pan gets you there.
- Butter alone will scorchAt the heat needed to colour venison, whole butter blackens. Use clarified butter, or a spoonful of neutral oil with a lump of butter added in the last minute for flavour and basting.
- Half a pint of brown gravyOne cup. In a hotel kitchen of this period 'brown gravy' would most likely have been a made brown sauce of the espagnole type rather than pan drippings thickened with flour, though the recipe does not say which. A cup of good beef or veal stock reduced hard, with a little butter whisked in, stands in acceptably; a splash of port or red wine would not be out of period.
- The mushrooms'Trim' here probably means no more than cutting the stems level and wiping the caps; the recipe does not call for slicing. Whole small caps simmered in the sauce while you work will absorb it and stay meaty; slices turn to threads.
- Deglaze the chop panThe recipe cooks the two elements separately, which wastes the fond. Pour the mushroom sauce into the empty chop pan off the heat, scrape, and then over the meat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of chops; a cup of sauce will dress roughly four to six.
Oscar Tschirky was never formally the chef of the Waldorf — his title was maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf collected the kitchen's working repertoire, and its game chapter reflects how ordinary venison then was on an American hotel menu. Wild deer, along with grouse, plover and canvasback duck, arrived by rail from commercial market hunters, and a New York restaurant could put game on the card as a matter of course rather than as a novelty. That trade was curtailed in the decades after this book's publication: the Lacey Act of 1900 barred interstate traffic in wildlife taken in violation of state law, state bans on market hunting followed, and for birds the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 finished the job — which is why venison in the twentieth century became either a hunter's own meat or, later, farmed. The recipe's assumption of a standing pot of brown gravy is equally of its moment: in a kitchen organised by stations, the sauce would have been another cook's finished work.