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Fowl, Salmi Of
Cut the birds (wild fowl or poultry) into neat pieces. Skin and remove the fat from them. Boil these with the trimmings and bones crushed for gravy. Slice a shallot, and add a little mace if liked, but the salmi may be simply seasoned with cayenne, a glass of port or claret, and some lemon-juice. Thicken with browned flour. Lay the pieces of fowl into a clean stewpan, pour the gravy over, and heat all thoroughly, but it should not boil. The spongy, dark substance on the inside of wild fowl is exceedingly bitter, and should not be boiled for gravy.
A salmi is a two-stage dish: a sauce built from the carcass of an already-roasted bird, then the joints warmed through in it. The original assumes you know the fowl is cooked before you start.
- Start with roast, not rawA salmi is a made-over dish for birds that have already been roasted, usually slightly underdone. Raw joints will not cook through in a sauce held below boiling; roast or part-roast the bird first, then carve and proceed.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the pieces go back into the gravy they are only reheating. A boil tightens the meat and turns wild duck or pheasant dry and livery. Hold the pan at a bare shiver, 160-170F, for ten minutes or so.
- "A glass" of port or claretIn Victorian usage a wineglass is roughly 2 fl oz (a scant quarter cup). Two glasses will not spoil a salmi made from four or five birds' worth of trimmings.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured. Toasting weakens its thickening power appreciably, so allow rather more than you would of raw flour -- in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons per cup of gravy -- or simply use a dark roux.
- MaceBlade mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg, not the ground spice jar. One blade per pint of gravy is plenty; fish it out before serving.
- The bitter substanceThe instruction refers to the lungs, the spongy dark pads set into the hollows of the ribs, and any trace of gall from the liver. Both make a stock genuinely bitter. Pick the rib cavities clean before the bones go into the pot.
- StrainingThe text does not say so, but the gravy should be strained off the crushed bones and shallot before it meets the fowl. Reduce it after straining if it tastes thin.
- YieldOne pheasant or two wild duck, or the remains of a roast chicken, will serve two to three as a main course with the sauce. Traditionally sent to table with fried bread croutons or toast points.
Salmi is a shortened form of the French salmigondis, a term for a ragout of mixed meats that turns up in French cookery writing well before it settled into its narrower nineteenth-century sense: game, already roasted, finished in a rich sauce made from its own bones and a fortified wine. It was associated with chafing-dish cookery, and is said sometimes to have been finished at the table in front of the diners; it belonged to the shooting season, when a household might have more pheasant, partridge and wild duck than it could serve roasted while fresh. The entry gives a method rather than fixed weights, which is the point: it was meant to absorb whatever birds came in from the field or came back from yesterday's dinner. The warning about the bitter dark matter inside wild fowl reflects a kitchen where birds arrived whole and undrawn, and the cook, not the poulterer, dealt with what was inside them.