In the past, noble lords and rich men - when they could get a licence from the Crown - built themselves a living larder in the shape of a deer park with high fences and walls. They went out and formally hunted the deer inside. Then they pigged on the venison. Now some of them are glad to sell the venison to the people, you and me, who used to poach it - if we could. Most of the venison comes from fallow deer, the kind that drop their horns in April and May in the park at Richmond; these are the usual inhabitants of deer parks. At Richmond, too, one may see red deer, which also provide venison, though more particularly in Scotland.
French chefs often used to complain that they could get nothing but venison from roe deer. The flesh, said Escoffier, was 'very often mediocre in quality' and he thought that the fallow deer from an English park 'has no equal as far as delicacy and tenderness are concerned'. They devised very good recipes all the same.
When you eat venison, reflect that in the Middle Ages it was an integral part of living it up. The menu survives of a feast given in 1443 at the inauguration of John Stafford, Archbishop of Canterbury. The game - strange list - included pheasant, swan, heron, crane, curlew, partridge, plover, rails and quails, but also three different dishes of venison.
They knew, the cooks of those days, that venison was a rich and gamey meat which needed tempering. They served it with frumenty, the wet ancestor of the packeted breakfast cereal, and with an early version of poivrade sauce. Sometimes it was enclosed in pastry. Venison cooking by the Victorian age had multiplied accompaniments of fruit and berries - pears, apples, oranges, cherries, juniper berries, even bananas. In this country port was as essential as redcurrant jelly, the two being combined in Francatelli's delicious sauce for venison.
Venison is no problem to cook. The trouble may be to buy it. Persist. The venison is there on the hoof. The sad thing is that three-quarters of it goes abroad (like our best scallops, pigs, horsemeat and lobsters). It seems, though, that our producers are beginning to meet tough competition from Russia and New Zealand, and may have to consider new markets. They might, who knows, consider us. With intelligent and patient publicity - think of the avocado pear and chicory campaigns - venison could soon become part of our normal choice of meat. It is not, after all, an exotic, but an old item of our national diet with a ready-made niche in our minds.
Venison en croute (for 4)
Venison steaks (or a boned roasting joint) may be encased in puff or shortcrust pastry, in the same way as fillet of beef.
340g short or puff pastry
4 loin or rump steaks of venison
113g chopped mushrooms
clove garlic, crushed
85g butter
about 57g breadcrumbs
egg yolk
Roll out the pastry and cut four oblong pieces large enough to enclose the steaks. Cook mushrooms and garlic in the butter gently, adding enough breadcrumbs to make a dampish stuffing. Sear the steaks quickly on both sides in a heavy pan which has been rubbed over with lard. Put some stuffing in the middle of a piece of pastry, then a steak, and some more stuffing. Repeat with the other steaks. Brush the pastry edges with beaten egg yolk and form turnovers. Brush the top, and bake for 20 minutes at gas-mark 6.
