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Stewed Venison
Cut the meat into fairly small square pieces. Put about three ounces of butter in a stewpan, melt it and then dredge in a small quantity of flour, stirring at the same time to mix with the butter. Put in two or three tablespoonfuls of bacon cut into small squares, two chopped shallots, half a dozen small onions, two cloves of garlic, and a few mushrooms. Put in the meat, season with salt and pepper and pour in sufficient claret and water mixed in equal quantities to cover the whole. Boil the meat gently at the side of the fire until tender, then remove it from the stewpan, skim the fat off the sauce, remove the garlic, and boil it quickly until rather thick and brown. Arrange the meat on a hot dish, pour the sauce and other ingredients over it, and serve without delay.
A straightforward red-wine venison stew, written for a coal range where a pan could be nudged to the cooler side of the fire. The quantities of meat and liquid are left to the cook, so decide the scale first and work back from there.
- Scale itThree ounces of butter and the vegetables listed suit roughly 3 lb of boneless venison shoulder or neck, serving six. That will take about a bottle of claret and an equal volume of water to cover.
- "At the side of the fire"This means a bare simmer, not a boil: roughly 190-200F on a low burner, or a low oven if you prefer, for 2 to 3 hours depending on the cut. The recipe says nothing about covering the pan, so watch the liquid level. Venison is very lean and turns dry and stringy if it is boiled hard.
- ClaretAny dry red Bordeaux or similar dry red works. Nineteenth-century claret tended to be lighter in alcohol than a modern bottling, so the half-and-half dilution with water is less odd than it looks; with a big modern red you may want two parts wine to one of water at most.
- Shallots and small onionsThe shallots are chopped for the base; the half-dozen small onions are meant to stay whole and come to the table in the sauce. Peeled pearl or cipollini onions do the job.
- Dredging the flourCook the flour in the butter a little before any liquid goes in. The recipe's own "thick and brown" finish comes from boiling the sauce down quickly at the end, and a cooked-out roux helps it along.
- The garlicTwo whole cloves are put in to perfume the pot and lifted out before the sauce is reduced. Leave them whole rather than chopping, or you cannot retrieve them.
- Reducing the sauceSkim the fat properly once the meat is out, then boil hard to about half. Skipping the skim leaves a greasy sauce, and venison fat in particular tastes tallowy.
- ServingBacon, onions and mushrooms all go back over the meat with the sauce. "Without delay" is presumably about getting it to table hot.
What remains here is essentially the French treatment of tough game -- a stew close to a civet or daube, built on a butter-and-flour roux, lardons, shallots, whole small onions and red wine, much the same framework as a bourguignon. The instruction to boil "at the side of the fire" dates the text as clearly as the claret does: on a range with a single hot firebox, the gentlest heat available was the far edge of the top plate, and many stew recipes were written around that fact.