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Venison
(Hunter's recipe.) Butter a large sheet of clean paper, and sprinkle it with salt. Spread a paste of flour and water over a board, and wrap the saddle of venison in it, then cover it closely with the paper, tying it to keep it in place. Put it in an earthen dish with 1/2 cup of butter and a glass of port wine, and baste it often while cooking, adding hot water if too dry. It ought to cook slowly, long enough to be tender. Ten minutes before serving, take off the paper and paste, sprinkle the meat with flour, and let it brown. Serve with a sauce of bread-crumbs called panada.
A saddle of venison sealed in flour-and-water paste and roasted slowly in a jacket that is torn off at the end for browning. The method still works, but the original assumes a wood-fired oven and a cook standing over it, so a few numbers help.
- The hinge: the paste is a shield, not a crustThe flour-and-water paste (a huff paste, or huff crust) is armour for very lean meat, keeping the surface from drying while the interior comes up to temperature. It is not meant to be eaten and it will not brown; it is stripped off for the final ten minutes so the meat itself can take colour.
- "Slowly" means 300-325F"Slowly" — the book gives no oven term or temperature, only the instruction to cook slowly and long enough to be tender. In a modern oven, 300-325F suits a paste-wrapped saddle, with the heat raised for the final browning once the paste and paper come off.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockVenison saddle is lean and turns grey and dry past medium. Take it to 125-130F at the thickest part of the loin for rare to medium-rare, allowing for carryover during the browning stage and the rest. A 4-6 lb saddle typically needs 1 1/2 to 2 hours wrapped, but the thermometer decides.
- "A glass of wine"In American and English cookbooks of this era a wine glass is about 1/4 cup (2 fl oz); a larger drinking glass would hold more. The exact quantity is not critical here — the wine is a basting liquid, not a measured element.
- The earthen dishA glazed earthenware baking dish, deep enough to hold the butter and wine without them scorching. A heavy roasting pan or an enamelled cast-iron dish does the same job; avoid thin sheet pans, which will burn the pan juices before the meat is done.
- Basting through the pasteBasting a wrapped joint does little for the meat directly. It keeps the paper and paste from cracking and burning, and keeps the pan liquid alive for the sauce. Add hot, not cold, water so the pan does not lose heat.
- PanadaThe sauce called for is a bread-crumb sauce, close to English bread sauce: crumbs simmered in milk or stock with butter and seasoning, often with onion and a blade of mace, cooked to a thick spoonable purée. The word derives from the Latin for bread and was used more broadly for bread softened or boiled in liquid, including the bread paste used to bind forcemeats.
- YieldA saddle of venison carved off the bone serves six to eight as a main course. Rest it 15-20 minutes after browning before carving the loins away from the backbone.
Wrapping a joint in a stiff flour-and-water paste is one of the oldest solutions to the oldest problem with venison: wild deer carries very little intramuscular fat, so a saddle exposed to direct oven heat dries long before it is tender. English cookery books recorded the paste-and-paper method for venison well before the nineteenth century, usually with buttered paper alongside the crust as here, and the paste discarded uneaten. The "hunter's recipe" framing attributes the dish to a sportsman rather than to a named kitchen, and the port and bread sauce point to an English ancestry whatever the book's travels. Bread sauce was standard with game birds on British tables of the period, and bread-thickened sauces of this kind descend from the older habit of thickening with crumbs rather than flour or egg.