To Pot Venison (or To bake Venison to keep six or eight Moneths)

After a number of meatless dishes over the last month and a bit, I decided this week to go with a recipe that is almost all meat. I had some venison roasting cuts in the freezer from hunting season and was looking to cook them fairly simply.  It was originally surprising to me that amongst the very spice-heavy and often elaborate preparations in upper-class Early Modern England, venison was often treated with restraint.  It was the product of protected noble lands and its consumption was an elite social marker.  Maybe for that reason, dishes like the ubiquitous venison pasty, which I attempted earlier, was usually not seasoned beyond salt and pepper.  If the meat itself showed you were rich and had status, maybe you did not need to add a massive variety of expensive, often imported, additives to show off your wealth. 

The venison recipe that I decided to try and recreate does not have much more to it than a pasty.  In fact, the pastry used in it is not even eaten.  One version of it shows up in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet (1670) under the eye-catching title “To bake Venison or Mutton to keep six or eight Moneths.” Reading through it, I realised it was instructions to “pot” the venison – covering it with a seasoned butter mixture which both flavoured and preserved it.  Looking around for other versions in the general period, I came across a comprehensive set of instructions “To pot Venison, or beef” in former royal cook Robert Smith’s Court Cookery: or the Compleat English Cook (1723).

It is a simple recipe in terms of ingredients but there are some interesting processes.  I did need to alter some ratios of the ingredients due to culinary logic and the results of the cook.  I will present my version of the instructions then some explanation of my adaption. 

Recipe

“To Pot Venison…”

Ingredients

• 750g (about 1 ½ lbs) venison round or any of the cuts from the haunch (UK), in one piece. 
• 2g (3/4 tsp) nutmeg 
• 7g (2 tsp) coarse ground pepper
• 2 large pinches salt 
• 250g (about ½ lbs) butter, possibly more if you want to actually pot or cover your venison for storage
• One recipe Hot Water Suet Pastry (recipe below)

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 160°C (320°F).

With the end of a sharp knife, make 3-4 holes in each side of your venison. (See Notes.)

In a small bowl, mix your nutmeg, pepper, and salt.  

With your finger push some of the nutmeg seasoning mixture into each of the holes.  

Rub some more of the same over the surface of the meat. 

Scatter a bit more of the mixture across the bottom of a shallow casserole dish.  Choose a dish about the same size as your piece of venison flattened out. (You may not use all your seasoning mixture, reserve if you want to pot your venison with more butter. Add it to that butter.)

Place venison in the casserole.

Dice or slice butter and scatter over venison.

Roll out pastry to the size of your dish.

Cover the dish with pastry and press the edges to seal. 

Bake in the middle of the oven for 4 hours.

Carefully take from oven, remove pastry and discard (it will be very hard and dry).

Place plastic wrap over the meat and the liquid in the casserole, then press down with as much weight as you safely can. (See Notes for the system I rigged up.) 

Allow to sit and cool completely, ideally overnight.

The butter will be solid but check to see if there is liquid below it.  If so, pour any liquid into a small pan and bring to a low boil.  Cook to reduce until thick and syrupy.  Also scrape all the butter out of the casserole and gently melt.  Mix reduced liquid and melted butter and pour over venison.  Again, allow to cool completely. 

If there is no liquid beyond the butter – mine did not have any - you can just leave the butter in the casserole, enveloping the meat. If you don’t have enough to cover the venison and want to pot it, melt more butter, add a couple pinches of extra seasoning mixture and pour over until fully covered. Allow any added butter to solidify.  

Serve small pieces of venison with some of the butter around it on toasted bread.  You may also add sugar and mustard.   

A bit of venison I took from the casserole and potted
with more butter and seasoning mixture in a canning jar.
 

Hot Water Suet Pastry 

Ingredients

• 1 cup flour
• ¼ cup water 
• 2 tablespoons suet (or any fat) 

Instructions 

Place your flour in a medium bowl and make a well in the centre.

Boil your water with your suet.

Pour water into the well.

Mix first with a wooden spoon and then your hands until you form a dough.

Cover and reserve.

Notes

While the ingredients and method come primarily from Robert Smith and his Court Cookery, I did compare Hannah Woolley’s “To bake Venison or Mutton to keep six or eight Moneths,” as well as “To pot Venison” from The Family Magazine (1741).  Specifically, the optional serving instructions which add sugar and mustard are Woolley’s and it did add an interesting dimension.  Since I was baking the venison under sealed pastry and had no visual indicators, I took an approximate cooking time from The Family Magazine, as it was the only one of the three that provided that information.  I reduced the “five or six hours” to four because I was not cooking a whole haunch, which all three recipes use. 

This reduction was also the basis for my initial attempt to adapt the quantities from Robert Smith’s recipe. I was using one cut from a smaller modern animal and I made the educated guess it was about the same as a third of a whole haunch from a period buck – 750g as opposed to 2kg. The first problem I ran into was the pepper: Smith calls for “three Ounces” but one third of that - 1 oz. - of pepper is a massive amount.  I measured out 7 g and thought that was plenty for the amount of meat I had. That is another one fourth reduced, or one twelfth of the original recipe.  I still did not end up using the mixture I made with that much pepper. Trying to reduce the other seasoning by similar amounts, I used about 2 grams of nutmeg – a whole nutmeg being generously 10g and Smith calls for 2 - and a couple pinches of salt instead of a large handful.  The division by 12, however, did not work for the only other ingredient - butter.  Smith’s instructions call for “three Pounds” and a quarter pound (around 155g) was not enough to cover the venison, which is the point of the period recipes.  I doubled it and it was just enough to pot the meat.  

My venison had been tied for roasting previously, so I did not make holes in the meat, as it says in the period recipe and my adaptation.  I untied it and simply rubbed the seasoning mixture into the natural seams and the lines made by the butcher’s twine.

Cooking times being reduced as I mentioned above, I decided to cook the venison at the low end of what you would cook a meat pie at: 160°C (320°F).  If you are looking for a real slow and low cook, this is probably a little bit high but it gave some nice taste and texture results that I will mention later.  

I say any fat in the pastry recipe because it is just there to make the pastry top workable.  You bake it too long for it to be really edible. 

Above you can see the way I pressed the venison while it cooled. I used a sturdy ceramic pot that fit inside the casserole, topped with an old cutting board, in turned topped with a 25lbs dumbbell.  I am sure there are prettier solutions out there, but it worked really well for me. 

Since the venison is pressed and cooked for a while, it comes apart by hand and can be spread with the butter.  The cooking temperature left some firmer, slightly caramelised edges, and there was a general browned, umami flavour through the casserole.  Cooking in butter also probably helped keep it soft and the pepper and background nutmeg are amazing flavours for it to bathe it. The just slightly gamey flavour of this particular venison (the animal fed in a lot of wheat fields) was enhanced by the pepper but also mellowed out by the nutmeg and butter.

Overall, this was one of the more successful and interesting recipes I have done, despite the ingredients being pretty limited and simple. Venison done right is always a very nice thing but this was certainly better than the pasty I did, which was still good.  

Served with sugar and English mustard powder

Two Tansies From Easter - A Bit of Mostly Lost Tradition

In Connoisseur magazine on Boxing Day, 1754, an author states that the mince-pie, that “excellent British repast…is as essential to Christmas, as pancake to Shrove Tuesday, tansy to Easter…”  Many modern holiday feasters in the English-speaking world still regularly consume the first two dishes at the appointed times but tansy or tansey or tansie at Easter has become significantly less observed.  Taking its name from the bitter herb - Tanacetum vulgare - used to flavour it and dye it green, a tansy was a regular end of Lent/Easter tradition for centuries.  The many and various recipes across the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries give instructions for something kind of like a pancake or omelette (or in my case, scrambled eggs). They universally contain eggs, an often-symbolic food in this Christian season, and, for at least the first couple of centuries, green juice from tansy plant stems.  The bitterness was considered a reference to the herbs eaten during Passover. 

I don’t have tansy – the herb; I ordered seeds for this year, but it will be months before I have any plants.  Owing to this, I choose a couple of the earliest recipes that do not contain it.  These seventeenth century instructions are some of the first instances I found where the name of the plant had transferred to a general term for the dish.  They are both from Hannah Woolley; the first is “To make an Apple Tansie” from The Queen-Like Closet (1670). “To make a Tansie of Spinage” comes a few years later in The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight (1675).  Spinach was a common addition or replacement for tansy as it gave the dish a green colour, which also had spring/Easter signification.  

These are a couple of my least successful recipes despite cheating a little, though, in the end, the taste was decent in both.  I will provide a recipe for each and a few notes in turn. 

Recipes 

"To Make an Apple Tansie"

Ingredients

• 250ml (about 1 cup) whipping cream
• 90g grated bread or breadcrumbs
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tbsp sugar, more for serving
• ¼ tsp cinnamon
• 2 tbsp of butter
• 2 small Spartan apples, sliced thinly horizontally (see Notes) 
• 1 tbsp lemon juice

Instructions

In a large bowl, make a batter with all ingredients up to the cinnamon.  Beat to combine with a wooden spoon.

Over medium heat, melt the butter in a large oven-proof frying pan, preferably with a lid.  

Place apple slices in the bottom of the pan in an overlapping circle around the outside edge.  Use any remaining slices to fill the centre of the pan, again overlapping. 

Cook for about 3 minutes until the apples are beginning to soften.

Reduce the heat to low and pour batter over the apples.

Preheat broiler in your oven. (See Notes)

Cover your frying pan and cook until the edges of your batter are set, about 10 minutes.

Remove cover and place in the middle of the oven under the broiler.

Broil until the entire tansy is set and cooked, about 4 minutes. 

Allow to cool slightly.

Place a large plate on top of your frying pan and carefully but quickly flip over.  This should leave cooked apples face up on top of your cooked batter. 

Serve, sprinkled with your lemon juice and extra sugar if desired.  

Notes

The titlepage from a 1675 edition of The Queen-Like Closet,
held by the London School of Economic Library and 
available in its digital collections. 

Generally, I reduced the ingredient quantities that Woolley provides by a factor of 4.  

The manchet was considered one of the finer breads; crumbs from any good white loave will do.  

I did not peel and core the apples, but it might be easier to eat if you do. 

My issues with this dish are down to things that are not mentioned in the recipe - cooking time and temperature.  Woolley, of course could not provide specific measures for those but my judgement failed me, and I started the apples too high.  They burned a little in the end and were cooking too fast to not burn before the batter was cooked at all.  Making sure you keep the temperature medium and below should help.  This recipe adaption is, therefore, a bit do-what-I- say-and-not-what-I-did, and bit modern adaptation.

Because the top and centre of the batter was not set, I improvised/cheated a bit by broiling it.  The period instructions say to flip it onto a plate when half cooked and slide it back into the pan to finish the batter.  I knew mine would not survive that movement but maybe if the heat was kept low and it was mostly set, you might give it a try.   

There was some bitterness from some of the darker apples, but the batter was pretty standardly tasty. It reminded me of the pain perdu I did a couple weeks back, which is not surprising as it has similar ingredients.  Trying again with lower heat, I am pretty sure this would be a very serviceable dish for a modern palate. 

"To make a Tansie of Spinage"

Ingredients 

• 100g spinach
• 250ml (about 1 cup) whipping cream  
• 5 egg yolks, lightly beaten
• 1 tbsp sugar, more for finishing
• ¼ tsp nutmeg
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• orange slices to serve

Instructions 

In a small pan, with a couple tablespoons of water, cook your spinach over medium heat until it is completely cooked and beginning to break down, about 10 minutes.

Drain your spinach through a fine-mesh sieve over a small bowl, reserving the liquid.  Then push as much of the spinach as possible through the sieve.  (See Notes.)

Combine that spinach juice with the cream, egg yolks, sugar, and nutmeg in a medium bowl.  Stir until well combined. 

On medium/low heat, melt the butter in a frying pan.

Pour in your egg and cream mixture. Cook until set, lifting edges and swirling the pan to get the uncooked top to flow underneath, as you would with an omelette.

Carefully remove from the pan, sprinkle with lemon juice and more sugar if desired.  Serve with orange slices. 

Notes

The bit of spinach that doesn’t push through your sieve is certainly edible in another use, if you like well-cooked spinach.  

Again, for this recipe, I divided the quantities in Hannah Woolley’s original instructions by 4.

Beyond the quantities, this recipe seemed a bit lacking: it does not actually say to cook the tansy.  I made the logical leap that this was an oversight.  It also produced a mixture that was very loose in the pan, even after cooking for a while.  If you want something that will come out of the pan like an omelette, probably add some more eggs.  If you want something more like a pancake, breadcrumbs or even flour will work. 

With nutmeg, eggs, cream, and sugar, this tasted nice, despite being green and not holding together, in my version at least.

Overall, my tansies, through fault of my own or not, were a little disappointing.  I learned a bit and, maybe next Easter, I will have tansy plants to use for some more attempts.  I may try something later this year when the plants are fresh.  Moving beyond Easter and Lent, I will be doing something meaty, yet to be determined, this coming week.

Tortelleti - An English Recipe from 1660 (Taken from an Italian Recipe from 1570)

Continuing to go through Fasting-Days recipes that would be used during the current season of Lent, I happened upon an interesting dish via a somewhat winding journey of research. Bills of fare or menus of dishes were commonly included in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookery texts; some of those were specifically for Fish or Fast Days, or the extended period of those days found in Lent.  Robert May who wrote The Accomplist Cook (1660) makes his political (Royalist) and religious (High Anglican) views clear.  It is therefore not surprising that he gives a prominent place in his book to "A Bill of Fare formerly used on Fasting Days and in Lent."  

He is pining for the great meals that were served – even during Lent – under the reign of Charles I, who was executed a little over ten years before his book was published.  In his bill of fare for the Fasting season, among the likes of “Lobsters,” “Souc't Turbut,” and “Stewed Oysters in Scollop Shells,” he includes the somewhat ambiguous – “Made dish of Spinage [Spinach]”.  A “made dish” is generally just a dish with several important ingredients but looking for what exactly he means, I found a section in the book entitled “Divers made Dishes or Capilotados.”  “Capilotado” does not have a ready translation but has some connection to Italy; there is a group of dishes in the section that begin with “Other made dishes, or little Pasties, called in Italian Tortelleti.”  A couple recipes later is “Tortelleti, or little Pasties otherwayes, of Beets or Spinage chopped very small.”  Having found a makeable made dish of spinach, I had my recipe for the week. 

There is generally no pasta today called Tortelleti but tortellini is a common dish.  Being a very amateur admirer of the Italian language, I bow to the more knowledgeable, but my understanding is that “-etto” (“-etti” in the plural) and “-ino” (“-ini”) are both endings that make the word mean something smaller.  So, we are talking about a little “torte” or “torta” basically.  “Torta” in Italian at that point could mean either cake or pie and contextually from May’s translation, and from an important Italian source, it seems obvious that tortelleti are tiny versions of the latter.  The important source is Bartolomeo Scappi – an internationally famous sixteenth-century cook, who served the likes of cardinals and popes.  I later found in my research that Scappi uses the term “Tortelletti” (with two “t”s) and, even later, I learned that May probably uses the term because he took pasta recipes – including the spinach one - from the Italian cook’s book: Opera (1570).  

I will discuss more about the English cook’s adaption and Scappi’s original in my notes at the end, but after that winding introduction, I present my recipe for Tortelleti of Spinage with dough/paste/sort of pasta from another tortelleti recipe.  

Recipe

“Tortelleti, or little Pasties otherways…of Spinage” 

Ingredients

• One recipe of “Paste” from “Little Pasties, called in Italian Tortelleti.” (recipe below)
• 30g (about 2 tbsp) butter
• 227g spinach, washed and well dried if needed
• Sweet herbs (I used ¼ tsp dried parsley, 1/8 tsp dried mint, 1/8 tsp dried marjoram)
• 10g (about 2 tbsp) grated Parmesan cheese plus more for finishing 
• Pinch of cinnamon plus more for finishing
• Pinch of cloves
• 1/8 tsp ground black pepper
• 20g currants 
• 1 egg, lightly beaten  
• 15g grated stale bread or breadcrumbs, more as needed
• 900ml of chicken broth
• Sugar for finishing.

Instructions

Prepare pasta as per recipe below, wrap in plastic wrap and set aside.

In a large frying pan, over medium heat, melt butter and sauté spinach until broken down - about 4 minutes. 

Allow to cool slightly and chop the cooked spinach fine. 

Place spinach in a bowl and add the remaining ingredients except the broth, sugar, extra cheese, and extra cinnamon.  Stir to combine. Set aside. You want your mixture fairly dry, if there is visible liquid, add more grated bread. 

Take half your paste, leaving the other half covered. On a large, floured surface, roll the half out, as thin as possible with a rolling pin. (You could try a pasta machine, but I have never done so with a dough that includes butter.)

Prepare a small bowl of warm water and place beside your bowl of spinach mixture. 

Using a 6cm (about 2.5”) cookie cutter or similar, cut a circle from the sheet of paste you have made. 

Holding the circle in one hand, dip your finger in the bowl of water and wet the rim. 

Spoon an amount of spinach onto the circle that will allow an edge of dough on all sides. Fold in half over the filling and squeeze the wetted edges together to form a seal.  Fold any excess dough over, to reinforce the seal.  

Put the raw tortelleti on a lightly floured plate or wax paper and repeat until you have used all the paste you can.  Roll out the reserved half of the paste; cut and continue until you use up all your filling.

Allow to rest while you bring your broth to a boil in a medium pot over high heat

Working in a couple batches, cook your tortelleti in the broth for about 6 minutes.

Carefully remove tortelleti – this paste is softer than normal pasta – with a slotted spoon and keep warm.  Repeat until all are cooked, reserving the broth. 

Pour broth into bowls, add tortelleti and serve with extra cinnamon and Parmesan, as well as sugar, scattered over top.

“Paste” from “Little Pasties, called in Italian Tortelleti.”

Ingredients

• 150g flour 
• ¼ tsp sugar
• 75g butter, cut into pieces
• 1 tbsp rosewater
• 3 tbsp boiling water

Instructions

In a large bowl, mix flour and sugar.

Place butter in another heatproof bowl.  

To butter, add rosewater and then the boiling water.

Stir vigorously until the butter has melted a bit and creamed.  It will look a bit like icing.

Make a well in the centre of your flour bowl and add the butter. 

With a wooden spoon, move the butter around to slowly incorporate the flour. Continue to stir with the spoon and then work with your hands until a dough has formed.

Cover and set aside.  

Notes

Frontispiece from a1678 edition
of the Accomplist Cook held at the
Bodleian Library

The title page from the above
mentioned copy

First, I could not find an even semi-reasonable priced bit of saffron in time for inclusion in my dish; both Robert May’s recipe and Scappi’s version call for it.  They are both writing for a very wealthy base readership but if you would like to include it, a pinch would do. 

There are no quantities mentioned in May’s set of instructions, so my quantities are based on experience and taste.  The English author merely says to “make your pasties” and so looking for a paste recipe, I found at least a set of ingredients in his first “Torteletti” recipe.  There he says to “make a piece of paste of warm or boiling liquor, and some rose water, sugar, butter.” I chose to use these somewhat different ingredients and went with water as my “liquor.”  I was somewhat vindicated in those choices when I started to compare Scappi’s earlier version, but more on that when I compare the two sets of instructions. 

The first tortelleti recipe in The Accomplisht Cook, in which
May includes a paste recipe.

The proportions I used for the paste come from a basic hot water pastry recipe, which calls for four parts flour to two parts shortening to one part water.  For that part water, I used 3 parts boiling water and 1 part rosewater, which I thought was plenty. The amount of sugar I used was probably low and I did not taste it at all, but I was concerned with the overall sweetness fighting the cheese.  This is generally a strange dough for a boiled pasta/dumpling.  It is a bit like perogies but softer and probably my least favourite part of the dish, especially after eating more than one or two.  

My misgivings aside, it is the correct paste/pasta to use explicitly according to Bartolomeo Scappi, which leads into a general examination of his recipes and how they differ from Robert May’s adaptions. On the subject of the pasta, the famous Italian cook says in his corresponding recipe: “habbiasi un sfoglio di pasta fatta nel modo che si dice nel capitolo 177.” That is very broadly translated as: have a sheet of pasta made like it says in chapter 177.  Chapter 177 is two recipes above – the recipe corresponding to where I got my paste ingredients in May’s book.  In his version, Scappi writes that you have “uno sfoglio di pasta” made with “fior di farina, acqua di rose, sale, butiro, zuccaro, & acqua tepida” – flour, rosewater, salt, butter, sugar and warm water.  May omits the salt and says to use either boiling (which I used) or warm water. The Scappi’s use of the word “butiro” for butter is notable; the general Italian word for butter is “burro,” which came to them from the Old French “burre.”  “Butiro” is more directly descended from the Latin “butyrum,” which led to “burre” and eventually our English “butter.”

Scappi's "tortelletti con la polpa di cappone" which includes
the ingredients for his pasta, highlighted above.

Returning to differences between Scappi’s 1570 Tortelletti and May’s 1660 ones, we can begin with the title, half the main ingredient and the explicit composition of the dish.  Scappi titles his instruction “Per far minestra di tortelletti d’herba alla Lombarda;” again roughly translated: To make Lombardy-style soup of herb tortelletti. Thus, you are probably meant to eat the pasta in the stock you cooked it in, though neither cook says this directly. While May says the pasta is made with beets (both cooks probably mean the greens) or spinach, Scappi says to use both.  

Scappi's tortelletti which includes spinach 

The processes in the recipes are similar as they are relatively simple. You cook the greens in butter and add most of the rest of the ingredients – sweet herbs (“una brancata d'herbe odorifere”), pepper (“pepe”), cinnamon (“cannella”), cloves (“garofani”), saffron (“zafferano”) and raw egg (“uove crude”).  One difference is there are raisins (“uva passa”) in the Italian dish while May calls for currants, which in another tortelletti, Scappi calls “uva passa di Corinto.”  This is similar to one modern French name for currants – “raisins sec de corinthe.”  

Scappi also calls for “cascio Parmeggiano grattato” – grated Parmesan cheese - like May but says you should include equal amounts of “cascio grasso.”  Maybe he does not include it because he didn’t know, like me, exactly what is meant by this “fat cheese.” The inclusion of the “s” in “cascio,” has fallen away since this period but the modern spelling can be seen in the simple “cacio e pepe” – cheese and pepper – pasta sauce.   

May’s last ingredient is grated bread while the Italian recipe says only to add it – “pan grattato” - if the “compsitione” is “troppo liquida” – too wet - and if it is too dry add “poco piu di butiro” – a little more butter.  May gets creative with what he says you can boil your tortelleti in – broth, cream, milk or almond milk; Scappi just says to cook them in “buon brodo di carne” – good meat broth - which makes sense if you are thinking of this as a soup, as the Italian title says.  The seemingly related phrase “thus you may do to any fish” is also May’s addition.  Both end saying you serve the tortelleti with cheese, sugar, and cinnamon over the top, which leads to how this sixteenth and seventeenth century pasta tastes. 

There is a lot of competing tastes and textures in these parcels, for a modern North American palate at least.  The pasta is soft, as I mentioned, but the flavours, those that can be discerned, are fine and the butter is okay since the dish is not that rich overall.  The filling has a number of background flavours and the Parmesan heightens things rather than being too forward.  The currants provide a nice break in sweetness and texture. The cinnamon, sugar and Parmesan added last fight a little towards different kinds of dishes but not in a completely unpleasant way.

I am interested in doing some more of May’s pasta dishes in the future and seeing how much more he drew from Scappi’s Opera.  However, this coming weekend is Easter and I will present the simple but seasonal tansy.