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Venison Steaks, Londonderry
Procure six four-ounce steaks from a leg of tender venison, neatly flatten, and season with a light teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon freshly crushed black peppers. Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a sautoire, place steaks in pan one beside another, briskly cook for five minutes on each side, dress on a dish and keep them hot. Remove all fat from pan, add four tablespoons currant jelly, stir with a wooden spoon until thoroughly melted, pour in half gill port wine, stir well and let cook five minutes. Pour in one gill demi-glace, add one saltspoon cayenne pepper, mix well, let boil for ten minutes, remove, pour over the steaks and serve.
A straightforward pan sauce built on the classic port-and-currant pairing for game. The only real trap is the cooking time, which belongs to an era of tougher, older venison.
- SautoireA straight-sided saute pan, not a sauteuse or skillet. Any wide, heavy pan that holds six steaks in one layer without crowding will do; stainless or carbon steel gives you the browned bits the sauce needs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the port is 1/4 cup and the demi-glace 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for half a cup of sauce; start with a pinch and add to taste.
- Five minutes a side is too longModern farmed and wild venison from the leg is very lean and turns dry and livery past medium. Four-ounce steaks flattened thin want roughly 1 to 2 minutes a side in a hot pan, pulled at 130-135F for medium-rare, then rested while you build the sauce.
- Currant jellyRedcurrant, not blackcurrant and not jam. Four tablespoons is sweet for six small steaks; three is closer to modern taste, and a spoonful of red wine vinegar at the end keeps the sauce from reading as dessert.
- Demi-glaceThe book assumes a stockpot of reduced brown veal stock standing ready. Failing that, reduce a cup of good unsalted beef or veal stock by half, or use a commercial demi-glace concentrate, which is salty enough that you should hold back on seasoning the sauce.
- Deglaze before the jellyPour off the fat as instructed, but put the port in first to lift the fond, then melt the jelly into it. Melting jelly in a dry hot pan scorches the sugar quickly.
- Reduction timeTen minutes of boiling will take half a cup of demi-glace well past a coating consistency. Simmer until it naps a spoon, usually 3 to 5 minutes, then mount with a knob of cold butter off the heat if you want gloss.
- YieldSix four-ounce steaks serves three as a main course, six as part of a longer menu of the sort this book assumes.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) belongs to the age when a dish was identified by its garnish and given the name of a place, a patron or a titled guest, a habit inherited from French restaurant practice and carried into American hotel kitchens. Londonderry here signals nothing about Ulster cookery; it is a label attached to a port-and-redcurrant sauce, the same pairing that underlies Cumberland sauce and most nineteenth-century English game accompaniments, where acid-sweet fruit jelly was held to correct the dryness and strong flavour of venison. Currant jelly with game is old enough in British and American cooking to have been unremarkable by the time Filippini wrote; what marks the recipe as its own period is the assumption that a cook has demi-glace on hand, which in a professional kitchen of 1906 meant a stockpot that never went cold.