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Roasted Venison
The loin, haunch, saddle or shoulder of venison may be roasted. After the piece has been carefully trimmed and freed from hairs, wipe it with a wet towel, season it with pepper and salt, cover it with several thicknesses of buttered paper, or with a paste made of flour and water, to retain its juice, place it in the oven and roast it twenty minutes for each pound of meat. Take off the paste or paper and quickly brown the venison. If a frothy appearance is desired, dredge the meat with flour, and baste it with butter before browning it. Serve very hot with red currant jelly.
A method rather than a formula: Oscar assumes the cook knows the cut, the fire and the sauce. Two things need translating — the timing and the wrapping.
- The timing is the hingeTwenty minutes per pound will take a loin or saddle far past well done and leave it dry and livery; venison has almost no intramuscular fat to protect it. Roast to internal temperature instead: 125-130F for rare to medium-rare on loin and saddle, 135F at most on a haunch, then rest 15 minutes.
- No oven temperature is givenAssume a hot oven; roughly 425-450F is a reasonable modern reading, though coal-range heat was judged by hand and cannot be pinned to a figure. For a large haunch, start hot for 15 minutes and drop to 350F.
- Cut by cutLoin and saddle are tender and want fast, high heat. Shoulder is the exception — it is worked muscle and does better braised covered with liquid for two to three hours than dry-roasted at any temperature.
- The paste is huff pasteFlour and water worked into a stiff dough, laid over the meat as a sacrificial jacket, and discarded. It steams the surface and keeps the juices in. Buttered paper does the same job; a double layer of parchment, or barding with sheets of pork fatback, is the modern equivalent.
- "Freed from hairs"Farmed and butcher-shop venison arrives clean, so this step is usually moot. Field-dressed meat still needs it, along with removal of the silverskin and any dried surface, both of which carry most of the strong flavour.
- Dredging for frothThe flour-and-butter finish under high heat gives a blistered, crusty exterior. It works, but only in the last five minutes and only after the paste comes off — flour added earlier will scorch.
- Currant jellyNot optional in period service; the sharp-sweet jelly is the counterweight to lean, mineral-tasting meat. Red currant jelly is still sold, and a Cumberland sauce built on it does the same work.
- YieldAllow roughly a third to a half pound of trimmed boneless loin per person; a bone-in haunch of 6-7 lb will serve 8-10.
Oscar Tschirky was writing at the Waldorf in the years when American venison was passing out of the market and into the game laws. Wild deer had been sold openly in city markets through the nineteenth century, and hotel menus treated saddle of venison as a standard autumn luxury alongside canvasback and terrapin; state after state then closed the commercial trade, and by the 1910s and 1920s the restaurant supply depended increasingly on imports. The technique here is older than the book — enclosing a lean roast in flour-and-water paste, generally called huff paste, is standard in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and pairing game with red currant jelly is a convention Oscar inherited rather than invented. What dates the recipe most plainly is the twenty minutes to the pound, a rule of thumb from the era before reliable thermometers, when cooks had no way to read the inside of a roast and erred toward the fire.