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Roast Leg of Venison
Remove the dry skin from the leg, wipe it with a damp cloth, and cover it with a flour and water paste. Put the venison in a baking tin and roast it in a very hot oven. Baste the meat continually, cook it for about an hour and a half, then remove the paste, coat it with butter, and sprinkle it well with flour. Cook for one hour longer, basting it frequently with butter, salt and flour. When cooked place the venison on a hot dish, and serve it with a sauceboatful of game-sauce. The above mentioned time is intended for a leg weighing about fifteen pounds.
A classic hotel treatment of a whole haunch, built around a flour-and-water crust that shields the lean meat while the oven does its work. Almost everything in it still holds; the numbers need translating.
- The flour paste is the hingeA flour-and-water paste covering the leg is a sacrificial jacket, not a pastry — it steams the outside and keeps venison's very lean muscle from drying before the centre comes up. Do not eat it, and do not skip it; without it the timing in this recipe is likely to produce grey meat.
- "A very hot oven"In period usage that is roughly 450–500F, depending on the source. Hold it there for the paste stage, then drop to about 375–400F once the crust comes off and the butter-and-flour basting begins, or the exposed surface will scorch in the second hour.
- The leg is much larger than yoursFifteen pounds is a whole haunch from a red deer or a large wild whitetail. A farmed venison leg sold today is commonly 5–8 lb, boneless portions smaller still. Scale down hard rather than trusting the two and a half hours.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockVenison has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and livery past medium. Pull it at 125–130F at the thickest point for rare to medium-rare and rest it 20 minutes under foil; the roast will carry over several degrees. The original timing works only for a haunch of that size in a fierce oven.
- Basting "with butter, salt and flour"This is the old dredge-and-baste method: sprinkle flour over the hot fat, let it brown, then baste, repeating to build a crisp savoury skin. Clarified butter behaves better here than whole butter, whose milk solids will burn at these temperatures.
- Game-sauceIn a kitchen of this period the term most likely points to a sauce venaison or poivrade — a peppery brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and often finished with redcurrant jelly and cream. Any strong red-wine and juniper reduction serves the same purpose.
- YieldA 15 lb bone-in haunch feeds twenty or more as a course. A modern 6 lb leg will serve eight to ten.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, when American hotel dining rooms still ran substantial game lists and a haunch of venison was a carving-trolley showpiece rather than a specialist purchase — much of it wild-shot and sold through city game markets, a trade the Lacey Act of 1900 and subsequent state laws largely ended. The flour-and-water armour is far older than the Waldorf: English and French cookery books had for well over a century directed that a haunch be papered and covered with a coarse paste before the spit, precisely because deer carries its fat outside the muscle rather than through it. The instruction to serve the roast with nothing but a sauceboat of game sauce is characteristic of the book's style — Oscar was maitre d'hotel rather than chef, and his entries read as service directions for a kitchen that already knew what it was doing.