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To Roast Venison
Mrs. Porter.
Wash a saddle of venison thoroughly in several waters, then rub it over with vinegar, red pepper, and a little salt; lard with strips of salt pork rolled in seasoned bread crumbs; season if you like, with sweet marjoram and sweet basil, one teaspoon each, also pepper; then rub the whole with currant jelly, and pour over it one bottle of claret wine. Let it stand all night, and next morning cover the venison with a paste made of flour and water half an inch thick; then cover with a soft paper, and secure well with strings; place it in the dripping-pan with some claret, butter, and water, and baste very often; half an hour before you take it up, remove paste and paper. baste it with butterand dredge with flour to make it brown. FOR SAUCE. Take a pound and a half of scraps of venison, with three pints of water, a few cloves, a few blades of mace, one-half a nutmeg, and salt and cayenne pepper to taste; boil it down to a pint, skim off the fat and strain; add half a pint of currant jelly, one pint of claret and one-quarter pound of butter, divided into bits and rolled in flour.
TO COOK SLICED HAM (VERY NICE).
Madame E. Pernet.
Cut raw ham in slices, soak in scalding water half an hour, lay your slices in a frying pan, pepper each, and lay on each slice a little made mustard; pour in half a teaspoonful of vinegar to each slice; fry quickly, turn often. When done take out, serve on a dish; add to the gravy a spoonful of wine, (if you have any handy), and a teaspoonful of sugar. Boil up once; pour over your ham, and serve.
Two recipes run together here: a saddle of venison roasted under a flour-and-water crust with its own claret gravy, and a quick pan treatment for raw ham slices. Both assume a cook who can judge a fire, so the numbers below are the ones the original leaves out.
- The paste is the whole pointThe half-inch flour-and-water shell (sometimes called a huff paste) is a sacrificial jacket, not food. Venison saddle is almost fat-free and will dry out in dry oven heat; the paste holds steam against the meat and is knocked off at the end so the surface can brown. Do not skip it and do not eat it.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because this was a roasting fire and dripping-pan. Roast at 325-350F under the paste; the recipe has you remove paste and paper half an hour before serving and baste with butter and dredge with flour to brown, which a hotter oven of about 425F will do, though the raised heat is a modern inference and not in the text.
- Judge by internal temperatureVenison saddle is best at 125-130F in the thickest part of the loin for medium rare, and it toughens rapidly past 140F. Timing depends entirely on the size of the saddle, which the recipe never states; use a thermometer inserted after the paste comes off, or through it if you can spare the crack.
- Marinate cold"Let it stand all night" was written for a cold larder or spring house. A whole saddle in a bottle of claret needs to sit in the refrigerator overnight, covered, in a non-reactive dish or a large bag.
- LardingStrips of salt pork threaded through the meat with a larding needle supply the fat venison lacks. If you have no larding needle, cut deep slits with a thin knife and push the seasoned strips in, or bard the saddle by tying sheets of pork fat or unsmoked bacon over the top.
- Claret and currant jellyClaret means a dry red Bordeaux; any dry, moderately tannic red works. Red currant jelly is still the classic accompaniment to venison and is sold with the preserves; a tart redcurrant or lingonberry preserve is the nearest substitute.
- The sauceA pound and a half of trimmings reduced from three pints to one pint takes an hour or more of gentle simmering. Blades of mace are the outer covering of nutmeg; a quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in. Whisk in the floured butter off the boil so the sauce thickens without breaking.
- YieldA saddle of venison varies widely with the size of the animal, from around 5 lb to 12 lb, and will serve eight to ten generously. The sauce as written comes to rather more than a quart, which is ample; halve it if you are roasting a single loin instead.
- The ham, adjustedThe half-hour soak in scalding water was to draw salt out of a heavily dry-cured country ham. Modern wet-cured supermarket ham is far milder and needs no soaking at all; soak only if you are using a genuine dry-cured country ham. "Made mustard" simply means prepared mustard from the jar.
The Home Cook Book, a Chicago charity compilation of the mid-1870s (first issued in 1874, with later reprintings), was compiled from contributions by named local women, and the double attribution here to Mrs. Porter and Madame E. Pernet is typical of the genre: the book's authority came from the standing of the households that supplied the receipts. Venison in an 1870s American cookbook was still largely wild meat, brought in by hunters or bought from market men rather than farmed, and the elaborate treatment reflects that reality. Wild deer carries almost no intramuscular fat, so the whole technique is a series of defenses against dryness: an acid and wine marinade, salt pork drawn through the flesh, a flour paste to trap steam, and constant basting. The flour-and-water crust is an old European roasting device, generally traced to the practice of enclosing lean game and hams in a coarse rye or wheat dough before spit- or oven-roasting, long predating aluminum foil, which does the same job today. The currant jelly, the claret and the reduced game stock place the dish squarely in the Anglo-French repertoire that ambitious American cooks of the 1870s were working from.