During the times of William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I venison was considered to be “a lords dysshe... a meat for greate men”. Deer hunting was only permitted to landowners – who were by definition only the most wealthy - and illegal hunting in royal forests was punishable by death or, if you were lucky, heavy fines.
William Shakespeare seems to have liked his venison, and there is a story that he was caught poaching deer on of Sir Thomas Lucy’s land at Charlecote Park (although this story is now generally discredited). There are several mentions of venison throughout Shakespeare’s plays, showing an understanding of the quality and status of the meat.
One of the best surviving cookbooks of the period is ‘The Good Housewife’s Jewel’, published by Thomas Dawson in 1596 with a second part in 1597. His recipes are not only for the highest status tables but also for the expanding middle classes of the period. The cooking is not over complicated but produces simply cooked fantastic tastes. We can also see from the recipes what ingredients are available to the large houses of the day and what was being eaten. We are told what to eat in each course, so ‘pasties of red deer’ would form part of the second course after a first course rich in roast meats.
Venison features in ‘The Good Housewife’s Jewel’ several times in different forms and one may well have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote “Come, we have a hot venison pasty to dinner” in the “Merry Wives of Windsor”.
To Bake a Red Deer
Take a handful of thyme, a handful of rosemary, a handful or winter savory, a handful of bay leaves and a handful of fennel. When your liquor seethe that you parboil your venison in, put in your herbs also, and parboil your venison until it be half enough. Then take it out and lay it upon a fair board that the water may run out from it. Then take a knife and prick it full of holes. While it is warm have a fair tray with vinegar therein and so put your venison in from morning until night, and ever now and then turn it upside down. Then at night have your coffin ready. This done, season it with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmegs, pepper and salt. And when you have seasoned it, put it in your coffyn and put a good quantity of sweet butter into it. Then put it into the oven at night when you go to bed. In the morning draw it forth and put a saucer full of vinegar into your pie at a hole in the top of it, so that the vinegar may run into every place of it. Then close up the hole again and turn the bottom upward. And so serve it in.
As with all recipes of the period, no quantities or measurements are given, and there is a degree of assumed knowledge. This recipe pre-cooks the venison with thyme, rosemary, winter savory, bay leaves and fennel in water. It is then marinated overnight in vinegar, before placing it with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, salt and pepper into a hard raised pastry case (coffyn), topping up with more vinegar and baking slowly at a low temperature. The slow-cooked meat, rich with herbs and spices, would melt in the mouth once brought out from the inedible pastry case.
Not much of the animal would go to waste as parts that we now consider inedible due to flavour or being offensive were put to use. Tongue was often a delicacy and rarely wasted.
To Roast Deer’s Tongues
Take deer’s tongues and lard them and serve them with sweet sauce.
Although we are not told what the ‘sweet sauce’ is, we can guess that it may well have been something like a sweet bread sauce with sugar, cinnamon, cloves and a squeeze of orange or lemon juice.
The next recipe is akin to a mincemeat recipe. We probably all know that the mincemeat pies that we tuck-in to today over Christmas with lashings of brandy butter have no meat in them, but we are often aware that their ancestors were much more meat based. The use of spices in the past has more to do with the fashion of taste and ostentation than it does to do with covering the taste of decaying meat. If you could afford the extreme cost of exotic spices during the sixteenth century, then you could certainly afford meat that wasn’t rotting away.
The ‘humbles’ in this recipe are the offal or lights, and this creates a ‘humble pie’, but it is unclear how this expensive spiced dish became the target of mirth in the saying of ‘eating humble pie’.
To Bake the Humbles of a Deer
Mince them very small and season them with salt and pepper, cinnamon and ginger, and sugar if you will, and cloves, mace, dates, and currants and, if you will, mince almonds, and put unto them. When it is baked you must put in fine fat, and sugar, cinnamon and ginger and let it boil. When it is minced put them together.
The final venison recipe is for those moments when you don’t actually have any venison to hand! This is for making a mock venison, using beef instead. The beef is salted in a barrel with juniper berries, and then served with an almond sauce.
To Make Red Deere
When you do not have game then take beef, cut to pieces, salt it with juniper in a barrel. Close it, like this it keeps a long time. Then one arranges it in a pepper sauce and when you will serve it then make an almond sauce. Take almonds peel them and cut them small make it up with small raisins make yellow and take sugar to it wine vinegar and beef fat let it simmer until dry and give it over the meat when you serve it so it looks very like game.
Thankfully, venison is now available for all to enjoy, and perhaps the most adventurous may still try out a Roast Tongue or Humble Pie, but perhaps the most significant venison quote from William Shakespeare should remind us to hunt well.
“I wished your venison better - it was ill killed.”
(This article was first published by the Wyre Forest Deer Management Society in their 2017 newsletter)
