Roast Venison
If the haunch is used trim off the dry skin and wipe thoroughly with a damp cloth. Rub well with salt and pepper, then with soft butter. Make a paste with flour and water and roll it out an inch thick. Envelop the haunch in this, place it on a rack in a pan and put in a very hot oven. Roast for two hours, basting every ten minutes with hot fat. Remove the paste, dredge the meat with flour, baste it with butter and water and roast for another hour. If the oven heat has been well kept up it should be but slightly rare. If the loin is used prepare in the same way, but roll out the paste thinner. A small loin with the paste covering will roast in an hour and a half, the paste being removed when two-thirds done; without the paste it will cook in an hour.
To the stock in the pan, when the grease has been poured off, add half a cupful of veal stock and one-half of a wineglassful of Madeira or port and strain it over the roast.
A straightforward lean-meat roast with one old technique at its centre: a thick flour-and-water crust that shields the venison while the oven does its work. The crust is worth keeping; the three-hour timing is not.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree hours in a hot oven will take a haunch far past the "slightly rare" the author wants. Use an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part and pull the roast at 125-130F for rare to medium-rare, then rest it 20 minutes under foil. On a modern 8-10 lb bone-in haunch that is usually 1.5 to 2 hours, not three.
- "A very hot oven"Around 450-475F. That heat makes sense for the first stretch while the paste is on; once the crust comes off, drop to 350-375F for the browning and finishing stage rather than holding the original blast.
- The flour pasteThis is a huff paste: flour and water only, no fat, mixed stiff and rolled about an inch thick for a haunch, thinner for a loin. It is a disposable jacket, not food, and it does the real work here by keeping a very lean muscle from drying out. Seal the seams well and expect it to come away in hard slabs.
- Basting a lean animalVenison has almost no intramuscular fat, which is why the recipe wants hot fat every ten minutes. Barding the haunch with a sheet of pork fat or bacon under the paste is less trouble and more effective, and lets you baste far less often.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in this period is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass is roughly 1 fl oz, about 2 tablespoons of Madeira or port. Half a cupful of veal stock is 4 fl oz; a good reduced beef or game stock stands in.
- The pan saucePour off the grease first, as directed, or the sauce will be greasy. Scrape up the browned residue, add stock and wine, simmer to reduce by about a third, then strain. A knob of cold butter off the heat gives it body the original does not bother to mention.
- YieldA whole haunch of farmed red or fallow deer, 8-10 lb bone-in, serves 10 to 14. A small loin serves 4 to 6 and is better treated as a quick high-heat roast — 20 to 25 minutes at 425F to 130F internal — than as an hour-and-a-half project.
Venison in a cookbook of this period sat awkwardly between wild game and luxury market meat. Market hunting had already gutted deer populations across the eastern states, and the state game laws and closed seasons of the 1890s and 1900s were the response; a household buying a haunch was as likely to be dealing with a butcher or a hotel supplier as with a hunter in the family. The flour-paste jacket the recipe calls for is much older than the book o the the medieff the medieval and early modern "coffin" of stiff flour-and-water dough used to protect meat in an open hearth or a bread oven with no thermostat. By the twentieth century it survived mainly for lean game, where the cook had no fat to rely on and no dial to turn down. The Madeira or port in the pan gravy is equally traditional: fortified wine was the standard accompaniment to game in Anglo-American cooking, valued because it kept far better than table wine in an opened bottle in the sideboard.