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Venison Steaks, Tokathian
Procure six five-ounce steaks from a round of stale venison and season all over with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon black pepper, saltspoon each grated nutmeg and ground cinnamon.
Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted lard in sautoir, arrange steaks in, briskly cook for four minutes on each side and dress on a hot dish. Remove all fat from pan, add four tablespoons currant jelly, stir until melted, then pour in a gill demi-glace and mix well. Add two ounces well-picked Smyrna raisins, let boil for five minutes, squeeze in juice of a quarter lemon, add a half gill cream, mix well, pour sauce over steaks and serve.
A sweet-spiced venison sauté from the era when Escoffier-trained chefs gave dishes geographic names and cooked them on French lines. Most of what needs translating here is vocabulary and doneness.
- "Stale venison" means aged, not spoiled"Stale venison" here most likely means hung or kept rather than spoiled; older English-language cookbooks use "stale" of meat that has not been freshly killed. No hanging time is specified. Much butcher-bought or farmed venison will have been hung already, so treat the instruction as a description of the meat rather than a step.
- The cutA "round of venison" is the leg, corresponding to beef top round. Six five-ounce steaks is a little under 2 lb of trimmed leg meat; the recipe gives no thickness, though steaks of that weight would run somewhere around ¾ inch. Loin or backstrap works and is more tender, though it is a costlier substitution.
- Archaic measuresA saltspoon is a scant ¼ teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so the demi-glace is 4 fl oz and the cream 2 fl oz. Two ounces of raisins is about ⅓ cup.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow, not a saucepan. Any heavy skillet that holds six steaks in one layer without crowding will do; crowd them and they steam.
- Doneness is the hingeFour minutes a side will take lean leg venison well past medium and into dryness. Sear hard and pull the steaks at 125–130°F internal for medium-rare — on ¾-inch steaks in a properly hot pan that is closer to two to three minutes a side. Venison has almost no intramuscular fat to forgive overcooking.
- Lard and heatTwo tablespoons of lard is right for the job; clarified butter, beef dripping or a neutral oil all substitute. The fat must be shimmering before the meat goes in, or the seasoning crust will not form in the short time the steaks are in the pan.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thick enough to coat a spoon. Good jarred demi-glace or a concentrated stock reduction is a fair stand-in; a bouillon cube is not, and will make the jelly-and-raisin sauce taste of salt.
- Smyrna raisinsGolden seedless grapes dried around Izmir — sold now as sultanas or golden raisins. "Well-picked" means gone over by hand for stems and grit, which modern packaged fruit rarely needs.
- Adding the creamLemon juice and reduced stock together will curdle cream held at a hard boil. Take the pan off the heat, stir the cream in, and warm it through without letting it bubble.
- YieldSix steaks, so six servings. Something plain absorbs the sauce best — spätzle, potato purée or braised red cabbage.
The International Cook Book (1906) was Alexander Filippini's attempt to catalogue the world's dishes as a professional chef understood them, which in practice meant French technique wearing foreign names. The suffix may point to Tokat in north-central Anatolia, though no source establishes that connection, and the seasoning does gesture that way: cinnamon and nutmeg on the meat, raisins and a sweet-sour finish in the sauce, all of which would read as "Turkish" to a New York diner of the period. The French bones show through anyway — a sautoir, a demi-glace, a mount of cream. The currant jelly is the one wholly Anglo-American note, since serving sharp red jelly with venison and other game was long established in British and American houses, and it slips into this sauce as though it belonged there. Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's, where game was a staple of the autumn card, and dishes like this one show a kitchen with a great deal of venison to move and a clientele that liked its dishes to have a place-name attached.