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Cotelettes of Venison, Sauce Poivrade
Trim, flatten and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika six fine venison chops.
Heat one and a half tablespoons good melted lard in a saucepan, lay the chops in the pan, one beside another, and fry five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish. Pour a hot Poivrade sauce over the chops and serve.
A very short recipe that assumes you already have a pan of Poivrade sauce going. Read it as instructions for the chops only; the sauce is the real work and lives elsewhere in the book.
- The sauce is the dishPoivrade is a brown sauce built on a mirepoix sweated in fat, deglazed with vinegar and white wine, moistened with game or veal stock, and finished with crushed peppercorns added only in the last few minutes. Add the pepper early and it turns harsh and bitter rather than aromatic. Have the sauce finished and strained before the chops go in the pan.
- Doneness, not minutesFive minutes a side suits a thick chop over the slower ranges of the period. Venison loin chops are usually 3/4 to 1 inch thick and lean enough that they go grey and dry past medium rare; cook to an internal 130-135F, which on a properly hot pan is closer to 2-3 minutes a side, then rest 5 minutes.
- "Flatten"Generally means pounding the chop lightly to an even thickness so it cooks uniformly, not beating it thin like a schnitzel. Keep the eye of the meat intact.
- Lard"Good melted lard" was the standard high-heat fat of the period and still works well here. Clarified butter, beef tallow or a neutral oil are direct swaps; whole butter will scorch at the heat this needs.
- PaprikaHere this means sweet paprika used as a mild seasoning and for colour, not the smoked Spanish sort. Half a teaspoon over six chops is a light dusting, and it will darken quickly in a hot pan, so season just before frying.
- Wild versus farmedFarmed venison is milder and slightly fattier than wild deer. If you are working with wild meat, expect a stronger flavour that stands up to more vinegar in the sauce.
- DeglazeThe recipe says to dress the chops and sauce them, which wastes the fond in the pan. Pour off the fat, deglaze with a splash of the vinegar or wine, and stir that into the sauce before serving.
- YieldSix chops serves three generously or six as a course in a longer menu. Chestnut purée, braised red cabbage or a poached pear are typical period accompaniments to game.
Cotelettes is simply the French for chops, and sauce poivrade — from poivre, pepper — is the classic accompaniment to furred game in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, a sharp brown sauce whose vinegar and cracked pepper were understood to cut the richness and any lingering gaminess of hung venison. Its brevity is telling: four sentences about the meat, with the reader trusted to look up the sauce elsewhere, since French method was the assumed grammar of ambitious home cooking. Venison was in an odd position in this period — no longer the freely hunted meat of the frontier, not yet a widely farmed product — so a recipe like this one addressed a cook who had come by half a dozen good chops through a hunter in the family or a well-stocked market, and wanted to serve them in the manner of a restaurant.