Home › The Principles of Cookery › Duck, Salmi Of
Duck, Salmi Of
Take the giblets of a duck, stew them gently in veal-gravy, seasoned with cayenne, three finely-shredded shallots, and some pepper and salt. Roast the duck, cut it up, and lay it in a stewpan with the gravy. Simmer till quite hot, then squeeze a bitter orange into the sauce, strain it over the duck, and send to table hot. More seasoning may be added for the English palate. Salmis are great favourites with French epicures; they are a species of moist devil, sufficiently piquant, as a rule, to please a French man's taste. Time: twenty minutes to roast; twenty minutes to stew. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A salmi is a two-stage dish: the bird is roasted short of done, then finished in a sauce built from its own giblets. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to roast a duck, so the useful work here is in timing, the sauce base, and the orange.
- The hinge: don't roast it twiceThe bird finishes cooking in the sauce, so it should leave the oven short of done. The recipe gives no oven heat and says nothing about degree of doneness; a hot oven (around 425F) until the breast is rosy works, then joint it and let the simmer in the giblet gravy bring it through. Twenty minutes will not cook a whole 4-5 lb duck; work to temperature instead, and take the legs to 175F and the breast to at least 165F in the pan before serving.
- GibletsDucks now generally come with neck, heart and gizzard, sometimes liver. Use neck, heart and gizzard for the stewing base; hold the liver back and mash it into the strained sauce at the end if you want the classic salmi richness. Discard any green-stained liver.
- Veal-gravyThis means a light brown veal stock, not gravy in the modern poured-over-a-roast sense. A good unsalted brown chicken or veal stock, about 2 cups, reduced a little, is the direct substitute. Bouillon cubes will make the finished sauce too salty once it reduces.
- ShallotsThree finely-shredded shallots; shallot size varies a great deal, so work to about 3 tablespoons finely chopped. Sweat them rather than boiling them raw in the stock if you want the sauce round rather than sharp.
- Bitter orangeSeville orange, in season only in late winter. Out of season, the juice of half a regular orange plus a squeeze of lemon gets close; a splash of the roasting-pan deglaze with a little red wine vinegar works too. The point is acid to cut the duck fat, so taste as you go.
- "Moist devil"A devil in this period meant something heavily peppered and mustardy, usually grilled. The comparison is telling you the cayenne is not a token pinch. Start at a quarter teaspoon in the stock and adjust once the sauce is strained.
- Skim the fatRoast duck sheds a great deal of fat into the stewpan and the recipe says nothing about it. Let the sauce settle and spoon the fat off before the final strain, or the dish arrives greasy. The rendered fat keeps for weeks in the refrigerator and is worth saving.
- Yield and serviceFour to five, as stated, if there is a substantial starch alongside. Serve on a hot dish with the strained sauce over, with plain boiled potatoes or a rice pilaf and something bitter, such as watercress or braised chicory.
The salmi (older English spelling salmis, generally traced to the French salmigondis, a hotchpotch) belongs to the French game kitchen, where it was the standard way of dealing with roasted wildfowl: partridge, woodcock, wild duck, snipe. The bird was roasted rare on the spit, carved, and the carcass and trimmings pounded and simmered to make the sauce that finished the flesh, so that nothing of the game flavour was wasted. Cassell's, writing for a late-Victorian English household, substitutes a domestic duck and its giblets for the pounded carcass and adds a note that the seasoning may want raising "for the English palate", which reflects the period's habit of treating French cookery as admirable but slightly overwrought. The bitter orange is the older marriage with duck, long predating the modern orange-sauce version; Seville oranges reached British kitchens each winter through the marmalade trade and were used as a souring agent much as lemons are now.