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Broiled Venison Steaks, Currant Jelly
Procure six small steaks of four ounces each from a tender leg of venison; neatly flatten them with a cleaver. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; repeatedly roll the steaks in the seasoning; arrange on a broiler and broil for four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, and send to the table with currant jelly separately.
A spare, professional set of instructions of the sort written for cooks who already knew what a gridiron did. Two things need attention: the heat source and the timing.
- The hinge: do not cook it throughVenison leg is almost fat-free, and it turns dry and livery the moment it passes medium. Pull the steaks at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare and let them rest three or four minutes.
- "Broil" means a grill hereIn a kitchen of this period the word meant a hinged wire broiler set over live coals, with heat from below and colour on both sides. A charcoal grill or a heavy ridged pan reproduces it best; under an overhead domestic broiler element, use the top rack and preheat it fully.
- Four minutes a side is too longFour minutes a side is likely too long -- a 4-oz leg steak flattened with a cleaver is perhaps half an inch thick and wants roughly two minutes a side over high heat, less if it has been pounded thinner.
- FlatteningThe point of the cleaver is to even the thickness, not to tenderise into paper. Use the flat of a heavy blade or a mallet and stop at about half an inch.
- The seasoning oilA tablespoon of oil with a teaspoon of salt for six small steaks is generous on salt but correct in method: the oil carries the seasoning and prevents sticking. Any neutral oil works; olive oil is fine over a grill but will smoke in a hot dry pan.
- White pepperMost likely chosen so no dark specks show on the dressed dish. Black pepper is not an identical substitute in flavour, but it works perfectly well; use whichever you prefer.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, served cold in a small dish alongside, never spooned over, as the recipe's "separately" indicates. Where redcurrant jelly is hard to find, a tart crab-apple or rowan jelly stands in.
- YieldSix 4-oz steaks is three to six servings depending on what else is on the table. Farmed venison, which is what most butchers sell, is milder and slightly fattier than the wild leg the recipe assumes.
Venison with currant jelly was a well-established pairing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American cooking, common enough that the two often appear together in recipe titles, as here. The logic is old and general: sharp, sweet fruit preserves cut the richness and faint muskiness of game, the same reasoning that puts apple with pork and cranberry with turkey. Redcurrant jelly was the standard English game accompaniment and passed into American kitchens with the rest of that repertoire. The assumption behind "a tender leg of venison" suggests a cook with a dependable game supplier, at a period when wild venison still moved through commercial markets more freely than it does now. The terse, portioned phrasing ("six small steaks of four ounces each") reads more like a professional manual than a domestic housekeeper's book, though the style alone cannot settle the point.