Standard Paper-Bag Cookery

Venison. — For roasting, the saddle is best. As the meat is naturally dry, it must be well larded with strips of firm fat pork. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and rub over with pork drippings. Put in large well greased bag, add two glasses of port or claret, seal and bake in moderate oven. For a roast of three pounds, allow an hour and ten minutes. For an eight pound roast, two hours and a half. Serve very hot with red or black currant jelly. Venison Steak. — Prepare in the regular way, place in wooden cookery dish and season with salt and pepper. Put in bag. Seal and cook an hour and twenty minutes. The wooden dishes add to the flavor of all game. CHAPTER X. BEEF. Bullock's Heart.- — THIS is an inexpensive portion of the beef, but a very tasty one when properly cooked. It should always be served on very hot dishes, both plates and platter. If you elect to roast your heart, put in a basin of warm water and let soak for an hour to draw out the blood. Wipe dry, brush with oil or butter and tie or skewer in shape. Put in well greased bag and roast about two hours. Serve with a border of carrots sliced and fried. Stewed Bullock's Heart. — Soak in a basin of warm water for an hour, then drain and wipe dry. Cut in halves, rub each side with flour and put in a frying pan with a little hot butter. As soon as browned, transfer to a buttered bag, adding four or five onions sliced and browned lightly in the same butter, together with a sprig of thyme and salt and pepper to season. Add a half cupful of water and cook slowly about three hours. Filet of Beef. — Cut from the end of a tenderloin of beef, slices about 5-8 of an inch thick. Flatten down to about 3-8 of an inch and trim round. Salt lightly on both sides, dust with pepper, and lay in a little hot melted butter, flavored with a tiny scraping of garlic for an hour, turning three or four times in the meantime. Take out, put in a well buttered bag, seal and cook twenty-five minutes. Serve on small pieces of toast that have been spread with butter and browned in a bag, pouring over them the juice of the meat that will have collected in the bag. Hamburg Steak. — Hamburg steak, which is too often a delusion and a snare as furnished by the inexperienced cook, can be so manipulated in paper bag cookery as to emerge a very delectable and decorative dish. In the first place never telephone for hamburg steak nor buy that already chopped and mounded ostentatiously on a platter with a garnish of parsley. Naturally the butcher works up his trimmings and inferior cuts into this comparatively inexpensive and much patronized form. Having purchased your cut of round steak in the slice, its lack of natural fat must be made up by the addition of a little beef suet (preferably from the kidney). A piece of suet the size of a butter nut may be allowed to each pound of lean meat. Next, if possible, get the butcher to chop it by hand rather than by the easier-tohim method of running it through the meat grinder. Now having your good meat at home it may be prepared in any one of a half dozen ways. For the Hamburg steaks, press lightly together into cakes about the size of a chop.