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.
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| 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
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.
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| Served with sugar and English mustard powder |
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