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Civet of Venison
Cut two pounds tender venison, from a leg, into inch-square pieces. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add the venison; season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; gently brown for ten minutes, turning the pieces once in a while. Then add two ounces lean, salt pork cut in quarter-inch-square pieces and twelve very small, peeled white onions; brown for ten minutes longer, besprinkle with two tablespoons flour over the meat and gently stir; moisten with one gill red wine, half pint of broth and one gill of demi-glace. Tie in a bunch three branches parsley, one branch chervil, one leek, one bay leaf, two cloves, one sprig thyme, one bean sound garlic, and add to the venison. Mix a little, cover the pan, then set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, take up the bouquet of herbs, add six finely minced mushrooms, lightly mix and serve with six heart-shaped bread croutons around the civet.
A classic French brown stew scaled for a small quantity of meat. The recipe assumes a kitchen with stock and demi-glace on hand and an oven whose heat the cook judged by feel.
- GillA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So the liquid is 1/2 cup red wine, 1 cup broth and 1/2 cup demi-glace, about 2 cups in total for 2 lb of meat.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A covered braise of this kind wants 325-350F; hotter and the sauce reduces to a glaze before the meat gives in.
- Forty minutes is optimisticInch cubes from a venison leg are lean and sinewy, and 40 minutes will usually leave them firm. Check at that point and expect to want another 30-60 minutes covered, adding broth if the pan goes dry.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole (brown sauce) combined with brown stock and reduced down, a staple of the professional kitchen this book draws on. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced brown stock both work; without it the sauce will be thinner and want extra reduction at the end.
- "One bean sound garlic"A single sound clove of garlic, unblemished. It goes into the bouquet whole and is lifted out with the herbs.
- Chervil and leekChervil is seasonal and fades fast; a few parsley stems and a pinch of tarragon stand in acceptably. The leek is probably a length of green top, which was commonly used to wrap and tie a bouquet.
- Salt porkSalt pork can be very salty; blanch the dice a minute in boiling water if you are watching the seasoning, since a teaspoon of salt has already gone in with the venison.
- Mushrooms at the endThey are stirred in raw off the heat and will barely cook. Sautéing them separately in butter first gives better colour and keeps them from watering down the finished sauce.
- YieldTwo pounds of boneless meat makes four generous servings; the six croutons suggest the original portioning was six.
Civet is one of the oldest surviving terms in French cookery, generally traced to cive, the old word for onion or chive — which may well account for the small onions here. In its strictest sense a civet is a game stew, most often hare, finished with the animal's own blood to bind the sauce; this venison version has dropped the blood in favour of demi-glace, as some restaurant versions of the period did. That professional lineage shows throughout: the salt pork and small onions of a garniture bourguignonne, the tied bouquet, the heart-shaped croutons set round the edge. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and pages like this one carry restaurant technique into a domestic book, on the assumption that a serious household could lay hands on both game and a pot of brown sauce.