Venison casserole has a problem: most recipes either treat the meat as a vague exotic or assume you have a ghillie on speed dial. Felicity Cloake's approach is neither. She reads the recipe literature — Caroline Conran's 1978 British Cooking, Gary Rhodes, David Eyre's Eagle Cookbook, Claire Macdonald, Clarissa Dickson Wright — and then tests the claims, which turns out to be the useful move. The cut question matters more than most recipes admit. The conventional advice is haunch or diced stewing chunks, and that's what you'll find in most supermarkets. Shoulder, when you can get it, is better: more marbled, richer, stickier after long cooking. The saddle is the one cut to avoid — too tender, it'll disintegrate rather than transform. The practical upshot: buy whatever your butcher calls 'stewing venison' and don't agonise, but if shoulder appears, take it. The marinade question is settled and the verdict is: skip it. Hervé This, the chemist, established that alcohol penetration of meat is millimetres deep and requires days to have any tenderising effect. Overnight soaking in 'gutsy red wine,' as John William of Raasay recommends, does essentially nothing measurable. The wine goes into the pot, where it actually does something: its fruit, tannins, and acidity combine with browned meat and bacon fat to build the sauce. The most interesting finding is the sweetness argument. Prunes and redcurrant jelly — or any fruit jelly you have sitting in the cupboard — do more for this dish than any amount of stock manipulation. Pickled walnuts alongside the prunes, as Claire Macdonald recommends, 'completely blended into the gravy and gave it a lovely richness and depth of flavour — neither too sweet nor too salty.' That's a tester quote, not marketing. The beetroot-as-enzyme-tenderiser claim from Clarissa Dickson Wright gets tested and filed under 'flavour only' — good sweet earthiness, but no detectable tenderising effect on Devon wild venison. Two things Gary Rhodes says turn out to be true: large two-bite chunks beat small dice (juicier in the middle, he's right despite sounding counterintuitive), and the oven beats the hob for maintaining a constant low simmer. Two hours at 160C fan is sufficient — no overnight cook required unless you have an AGA and a convenient excuse. The most useful tip in the piece is Claire Macdonald's 'twice cooking' method: 90 minutes now, 30 minutes reheated tomorrow. It genuinely works. The flavours knit overnight in a way that straight-through cooking doesn't replicate. The recipe itself — 800g boned shoulder (if available), streaky bacon for fat, onion, leek, carrot, thyme, 300ml red wine, eight prunes, a tablespoon of redcurrant jelly — is built from comparative testing, not intuition. That's the difference between a tested recipe and a transmitted one. Serves four, prep 20 minutes, total cooking 2.5 hours, and it freezes well. In season or frozen, venison is good value and, relative to farmed beef, comparatively climate-friendly — though not without complication, as the BBC Future piece it links to explains.
