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Tournedos of Venison, Cumberland
Procure six four-ounce round pieces of venison from the leg part, neatly trim and flatten, season all around with a half teaspoon black pepper and teaspoon salt. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, arrange in steaks one beside another and briskly cook for four minutes on each side. Prepare six round toasts two inches in diameter and a third of an inch thick, place on a hot dish, arrange tournedos over toasts, pour Cumberland sauce over all and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry that hinges entirely on not overcooking lean leg meat. The sauce is the part the recipe assumes you already know.
- Cook it far less than four minutes a sideA four-ounce medallion an inch thick reaches medium-rare (125-130F internal) in roughly two minutes a side in a hot pan. Venison leg has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and livery past about 135F; the original timing belongs to an era that cooked game through.
- TournedosThe term is borrowed from beef fillet cookery and means small round steaks cut from a trimmed muscle. From a venison leg, take the top round or the eye of round, cut across the grain, and tie each one with string so it holds its shape while frying.
- Trim and flattenRemove all silverskin, which will not soften in four minutes and makes the medallion curl. Flatten only lightly to an even thickness, about three quarters of an inch to an inch; pounding thin defeats the point.
- Butter alone will burnOne tablespoon of butter in a pan hot enough to sear six steaks will blacken. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, and add a fresh knob at the end for basting.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for a pound and a half of meat is about right by modern standards too. Season immediately before cooking, not in advance, so the surface stays dry enough to brown.
- Cumberland sauceFilippini expects you to make it separately: redcurrant jelly melted with port, blanched shredded orange and lemon zest, their juice, mustard, and a little ginger or cayenne. It is served cool or barely warm, and it is not thickened with flour.
- The croutesTwo-inch rounds of firm white bread, a third of an inch thick, fried in butter or clarified butter rather than dry-toasted. They exist to catch the juices, and dry toast goes to paste under the sauce.
- Rest and yieldRest the medallions two or three minutes on a warm plate before plating. Six pieces serves three as a main course, six as a first course.
Cumberland sauce is the fixed partner of cold game and venison in Victorian and Edwardian cooking: redcurrant jelly, port, citrus zest and mustard, sharp and sweet, served cold against rich dark meat. Its name is generally traced to the Hanoverian Dukes of Cumberland, and the sauce is claimed by both English and German tables, appearing in Germany as Cumberlandso\... traditional rather than documented, and the earliest printed English versions belong to the later nineteenth century. Pairing it with tournedos, a term taken from French fillet-of-beef cookery, is typical of the grand-hotel style Alexander Filippini worked in at Delmonico's in New York, where a dish was often built by naming a cut in French and a sauce after a place.