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Venison Steaks with Raisins
Procure six five-ounce venison steaks and season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in sautoire, arrange the steaks in one beside another and briskly cook on the open fire for two minutes on each side, lift up and keep hot on a plate. Remove fat from pan, add two tablespoons currant jelly, stir on fire until melted, then pour in two tablespoons sherry and one and a half gills demi-glace. Add two ounces seeded California raisins, mix well and let gently boil for six minutes. Add steaks one beside another and cook for six minutes, dress on a hot dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A classic hotel-kitchen treatment of venison: hard sear, sweet-sharp pan sauce, brown stock reduction. The main adjustment is to the second cooking, which will take lean venison well past where most cooks want it.
- The hinge: total cooking timeTwo minutes a side plus six minutes braising in sauce is a lot for a five-ounce venison steak, which has almost no intramuscular fat and turns dry and livery above about 140F. Sear the steaks, build the sauce separately, and return them only long enough to warm through — a minute or two — pulling them at 130-135F internal for medium-rare.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan with a flat bottom, wider than a saucepan and deeper than a skillet. Any heavy 10- to 12-inch sauté pan works; you want the steaks in a single layer with room for the sauce afterwards.
- "On the open fire"In period kitchen writing this generally means the open top of the range, i.e. direct heat over the fire, as opposed to the oven or the slower back of the stove; a sautoire is used here, so read it as a hot burner rather than a grill or hearth.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is three-quarters of a cup.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock with sauce espagnole, cooked down to a syrupy gloss. Good jarred demi-glace or a concentrated stock reduction stands in; ordinary canned broth will not, since it lacks the body that carries the jelly and wine.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not the black currant preserve or anything made from dried Zante currants. It is there for tart sweetness against the game, and cranberry jelly is the closest common substitute.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" meant the seeds had been removed, the raisins being a muscat-type grape rather than the seedless sort; the seedless raisins now sold are a different grape and will do without comment. Two ounces is a scant half cup.
- SherryUse a dry amontillado or oloroso. Cream sherry compounds the jelly and the raisins and makes the sauce cloying.
- YieldSix steaks, six servings, with roughly two tablespoons of sauce each. Potato purée and chestnuts are common accompaniments for game in this period.
Sweet-and-sour sauces for game are older than the classical French kitchen — medieval European cooks paired venison with dried fruit, wine and spice, partly for flavor and partly because sugar and raisins were prestige goods worth showing off. By the time this book was written the pairing had been codified in the escoffier-era repertoire as a family of related sauces: sauce chevreuil, sauce grand veneur, sauce poivrade and their many cousins, all of them intended for roe deer, hare and boar. One telling detail is "seeded California raisins." California's raisin industry expanded rapidly in the decades around 1900, and its growers marketed aggressively to hotels and cookbook writers; naming the origin was a small act of endorsement, of a kind that appears throughout early twentieth-century American professional cookery. The venison itself would have come from a market game dealer, a trade that American conservation laws were in the process of shutting down.