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Salmi of Lamb
Cut cold roast lamb in thin slices. Cook 5 minutes 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped onion. Add lamb, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with 1 cup cold lamb gravy seasoned with Worcestershire sauce. Cook until thoroughly heated. Arrange slices overlapping one another lengthwise of platter, pour around sauce, and garnish with toast points. A few stoned olives and mushrooms improve this sauce.
A leftovers dish from a Crisco promotional cookbook, built entirely on cold roast lamb and the gravy that came with it. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the components are in hand.
- Keep it below a simmerAlready-cooked lamb reheated in bubbling sauce goes grey and stringy. Bring the gravy to steaming, slide the slices in, and hold them there three or four minutes only — "thoroughly heated" means hot through, not cooked again.
- CriscoStill sold, and this book exists largely to advertise it. Any neutral fat works; 2 tablespoons of butter gives a better sauce, and a spoonful of the solidified fat from the top of the chilled gravy is better still.
- If you have no lamb gravyA cup of good beef or lamb stock thickened with a scant tablespoon of flour cooked into the fat and onion will stand in. Without a real gravy base the dish is thin, so reduce it a little and finish with a knob of butter.
- WorcestershireNo quantity given. Half a teaspoon in a cup of gravy is noticeable; a full teaspoon is assertive. Add it off the heat and taste, since old gravy is often already salty.
- Stoned olivesPitted olives; the recipe does not say which kind, and green olives are a reasonable choice. Slice them and add with the mushrooms in the last two minutes; whole olives never quite integrate into the sauce.
- MushroomsCook them separately in a little fat until browned and their water has gone, then add. Dropped raw into the gravy they release liquid and dilute it.
- Toast pointsCrustless bread toasted and cut corner to corner. Cut them after toasting or the edges curl, and set them around the rim at the last moment.
- YieldAbout a cup of gravy and the meat off a modest leftover roast serves two to three, or four as part of a larger meal. Slice the lamb thin and across the grain.
A salmi (from the French salmis) began as a game-cookery term: birds part-roasted, carved, and finished in a rich sauce made from the trimmings and bones. By the nineteenth century English and American cooks had loosened the word to mean almost any sliced cooked meat rewarmed in a well-seasoned gravy, which made it the natural label for a Monday dish built on Sunday's roast. That is exactly its function here — A Calendar of Dinners was a promotional cookbook written to demonstrate the uses of Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening Procter & Gamble introduced in 1911, and its menus lean heavily on economy, planned leftovers, and substituting the new shortening wherever butter or lard had traditionally gone.