Home › The World's Kitchen › Venison Steaks, Vigneron
Venison Steaks, Vigneron
Procure six four-ounce, tender venison steaks, place them in an earthen jar with a sliced onion, bean crushed garlic, sprig each thyme and marjoram, blade mace, bay leaf, clove, branch parsley and branch chervil. Pour in enough claret to just cover the steaks, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and teaspoon fresh crushed allspice. Cover pan and let infuse over night, if possible, or as long as you can. Forty-five minutes before serving lift up, wipe and keep them on a plate. Place marinade in saucepan and let reduce on open fire to half the quantity, strain gravy through a cheesecloth into another saucepan, add three tablespoons currant jelly, a gill tomato sauce mix well and let boil for fifteen minutes, then keep hot. Pick off grapes from a pound of white grapes, place in frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter, briskly fry for five minutes and keep hot. Lightly roll steaks in a tablespoon oil, arrange on a broiler and cook over a lively fire for five minutes on each side, dress on a large, hot dish, arrange grapes around, pour sauce over and serve.
A classical French marinade-and-grill treatment, with a grape garnish that gives the dish its name. The instructions are sound; the units and one or two ingredient names need translating.
- The hinge: do not overcook the steaksVenison is very lean and turns dry and livery past medium rare. Four-ounce steaks over a lively fire will be done well before the ten minutes total given here — work to an internal temperature of about 130F and pull them off, whatever the clock says. Farmed venison is the safer bet for pink meat; genuinely wild game carries more risk and is usually cooked further.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So half a cup of tomato sauce in the reduced marinade.
- Tomato sauceIn a kitchen of this period this means a cooked, lightly seasoned tomato sauce of the sauce-tomate family, not ketchup and not a garlicky pasta sauce. Passata simmered down with a little butter is the closest easy substitute.
- "Bean crushed garlic"An awkward phrase for a bean-sized piece of crushed garlic — roughly one clove. It is a background note in the marinade, not a feature.
- Blade of maceOne whole piece of the dried aril from a nutmeg, about the size of a fingernail. A scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in, though it will cloud the marinade slightly.
- ClaretA dry red Bordeaux or any dry, medium-bodied red. You will need about two cups to cover six steaks in a narrow vessel; choose the smallest dish that holds them in one layer.
- The vesselThe earthen jar matters because wine and salt attack reactive metal. Glass, glazed ceramic or stainless steel; not aluminium, not cast iron.
- The grapesA pound of white grapes, picked from the stems — seedless table grapes are fine and save the work of pipping. Five minutes in butter is enough to warm and blister them; longer and they collapse.
- YieldSix four-ounce steaks, so six modest portions or three generous ones. The sauce will amount to something over a cup once the jelly and tomato go in.
Vigneron is French for winegrower, and in classical menu language a dish à la vigneron carries grapes, wine, or both — the harvest on the plate. Here the claret does double duty as marinade and as the base of the sauce, finished in the old style with currant jelly, the sweet-sharp partner to game long favoured in both English and French kitchens. The long overnight steep in wine and aromatics was likely less about flavour than about handling: venison of uncertain age was often said to benefit from a marinade to tenderise and tame it.