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Venison Pot Pie, Santa Barbora
Cut two pounds venison from shoulder or leg part into one-inch pieces. Cut a medium carrot and onion in halves, cut each half in two, finely slice and place in saucepan with two tablespoons melted butter, add half pound raw, lean salt pork cut in quarter-inch squares and gently fry for five minutes. Add venison, season with one and a half teaspoons salt, half teaspoon black pepper, and briskly fry for fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Pour in two gills Zinfandel claret, let wine reduce to half quantity, then two gills each demi-glace and tomato sauce.
Soak a pound California dried figs in water for three hours, drain, cut off stems, divide in quarters and add to venison. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one of chervil, a blade thyme, bay leaf, clove, add to pan, mix well, cover pan and set in oven forty-five minutes. Remove, take up bouquet. skim fat from surface, transfer the whole into a baking dish and sprinkle a little chopped chives over. Roll on a floured table a half pound pie paste to a quarter-inch in thickness. Lightly egg edges around baking dish, then cover with layer of paste, press down all around edges, make a few incisions in center, trim off all around, egg surface, set in oven for forty-five minutes, remove and send to the table.
A braise finished under a pastry lid, built on two California signatures: Zinfandel and dried figs. Most of the work is in the pot before the crust ever appears.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is 1 cup. The recipe calls for 1 cup wine, 1 cup demi-glace and 1 cup tomato sauce.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. The covered braise wants a steady 325F; the pastry stage wants 400-425F so the crust colours and sets rather than steaming over the stew.
- The braise is the hingeForty-five minutes covered may not fully tenderise shoulder cut into inch dice, though the dish then bakes a further forty-five minutes under its lid. If the meat is still firm at the end of the covered stage, extend it -- up to 1.5 to 2 hours -- until the meat yields to a fork, then let it cool slightly before the crust goes on. A hot, loose filling turns pastry to paste.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole sauce and brown stock reduced together by half. A good jarred demi-glace works, or reduce 3 cups of dark veal or beef stock to 1 cup as a stand-in; unreduced stock will leave the sauce thin.
- Zinfandel claretCalifornia producers of the period sold Zinfandel under the borrowed name claret. Any dry, medium-bodied red does the job; a Zinfandel keeps the point of the dish.
- SaltHalf a pound of salt pork plus 1.5 teaspoons salt plus commercial demi-glace and tomato sauce is a lot of sodium. Blanch the salt pork briefly, then hold back the added salt until you taste at the end.
- The bouquetA "blade" of thyme is a sprig; the clove is a single whole clove, not a clove of garlic. Tie everything in cheesecloth so the clove and bay come out cleanly.
- FigsDried figs of the period were likely drier than many sold now. Three hours of soaking may be more than modern soft figs need; an hour is often enough to plump them without collapse.
- Pastry and yieldHalf a pound of pie paste rolled a quarter-inch thick makes a lid of roughly 8 to 9 inches across, so size the baking dish to match. Two pounds of venison plus pork and figs serves four to six generously.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent years in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and his books are full of dishes named for places, patrons and hotels in the manner of the period. The Santa Barbara title is doing honest work here: the two ingredients that distinguish the pie from any other venison braise are Californian, the Zinfandel and the dried figs, both products of an industry that had grown fast in the decades after the railroads reached the coast. Zinfandel was widely bottled as "claret" then, a marketing borrowing from Bordeaux that tells you how young California wine was in the eyes of eastern buyers. The pairing of game with dried fruit is far older than either, running back through medieval European cookery, but Filippini's version reads as a French kitchen technique with a Pacific pantry dropped into it.