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Roast Saddle of Venison, Currant Jelly (Procure a nice small saddle)
Procure a nice small saddle of venison of about four pounds. Neatly tie it with string all around. Season with a level teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, well rubbed in. lay the saddle on a small roasting tin; pour a tablespoon hot fat over the saddle and two tablespoons water in the bottom of the pan. Set in the oven and roast for forty-five minutes, being careful to turn and baste with its own gravy quite frequently. Remove from the oven, dress on a hot dish; skim the fat from the surface of the gravy, then strain the gravy over the venison and send to the table with currant jelly, separately.
The original omits an oven temperature and assumes a butcher who will hand you a bone-in saddle. Both need filling in, and the 45-minute timing tells you what heat was intended.
- What a saddle isThe saddle is the whole loin section on the bone, both sides of the backbone, cut as one piece. At four pounds it will be a short saddle from a small deer or a farmed animal; a boneless double loin of the same weight works and cooks faster.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature. Forty-five minutes for four pounds points to a hot oven: try around 450F, or 425F if your oven runs strong. At a moderate heat this timing would likely leave the centre underdone.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockVenison loin is lean and unforgiving. Pull it at 125-130F at the thickest point for rosy medium-rare; 145F is the USDA figure for whole cuts and is about as far as this cut can go before it dries out. Rest it 10 minutes under foil before carving.
- Fat is not optionalA single tablespoon of hot fat is the minimum. Because there is almost no intramuscular fat, many cooks bard the saddle with sheets of pork fat or bacon tied over the top, removed for the last ten minutes to let the surface brown.
- Basting and the waterThe two tablespoons of water in the pan are there to keep the drippings from scorching, not to steam the meat. Top up with a spoonful more if the pan goes dry, and baste every ten minutes or so as directed.
- The gravyWhat you get is pan juice, not a thickened sauce: skim, strain, and pour it over. If you want more of it, deglaze the tin with a splash of red wine or stock over direct heat while the roast rests.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, served cold and unadorned in a separate dish. It is easily found in supermarkets; if not, a tart unsweetened cranberry or lingonberry preserve fills the same role.
- YieldA four-pound bone-in saddle serves four generously, six if there are other substantial courses.
Saddle of venison with currant jelly is one of the fixed pairings of Anglo-French service, and it appears in American cookbooks of this period alongside the game dishes of the great hotel and club kitchens, where game was a mark of an expensive menu. The logic of the pairing is straightforward: lean, faintly liverish game meat against something sharp and sweet, the same instinct behind Cumberland sauce, made from red currant jelly, port and orange, which appears in nineteenth-century kitchens. The instruction to "procure a nice small saddle" also suggests the period. Venison then came from a hunter or a game dealer, arrived seasonally, and varied in age and toughness, which may be why the author says little about it beyond the weight; farmed venison, consistently tender and now sold year round, is a much later development. Serving the jelly "separately" follows the period table convention that kept sauces in boats and let the diner decide.