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Game, Salmi Of
A salmi differs from a hash in this, that it is made of game which has been only partially dressed, whilst a has consists of game which has been properly cooked and become cold. Carve the meat into neat joints, rejecting the skin and gristle. Put a quarter of a pound of raw, lean ham, finely minced, into a saucepan, with a little butter, a sprig of parsley, two or three shallots, a tea-spoonful of pepper, a blade of mace, and a little salt and cayenne. Let these ingredients stew gently for a few minutes, then mix in smoothly a table-spoonful of flour, and a dessert-spoonful of mushroom-powder. Let it brown, and add a breakfast-cupful of good stock, and a glass of claret. Let the mixture boil. Put in the bones and trimmings, and simmer over a moderate fire for an hour or more. A small carrot, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a bay-leaf may be simmered with the rest. Skim carefully, strain, and when ready to serve, put the joints in with the gravy, and heat all slowly, but it must not boil. Garnish the dish with toasted sippets. A salmi should be highly-seasoned. Probable cost, exclusive of the game and wine, 10d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A salmi is a sauce built from the bones and trimmings of underdone game, with the carved joints warmed through in it at the last moment. Everything here is about the sauce; the meat is barely cooked twice.
- The hingeThe joints go into the finished, strained sauce and are heated slowly without boiling. Boiling squeezes the juices out of game breast and turns it grey and stringy. Aim for the sauce sitting at a bare tremble. Modern food-safety advice would have poultry and game reach 165F/74C at the centre, though that is more cooking than this dish intends, and the time needed will depend on the size of the joints.
- "Only partially dressed"The game is meant to have been roasted rare — pheasant, partridge, grouse, or wild duck taken from the oven while the breast is still pink. If your birds are already fully cooked, you have a hash by the book's own definition, and the joints want only a couple of minutes in the sauce.
- MeasuresA breakfast-cupful is roughly 10 fl oz (about 1 1/4 cups); a glass of claret is loosely defined, a period wineglassful usually being reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though a larger glass may be meant. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. A blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril, about a quarter-teaspoon ground if that is all you have.
- Mushroom-powderDried mushrooms ground to a powder — a Victorian store-cupboard staple used the way we use stock concentrate. Dried porcini or shiitake blitzed in a spice grinder is the same thing. Two teaspoons is a lot of flavour, which is the intention.
- Raw lean hamCured ham, minced small: gammon, or the trimmings from a prosciutto end. Period hams might be smoked or unsmoked; a mild one is safest here, since a strongly smoked ham will dominate the sauce. Sweat it gently in butter with the aromatics rather than browning it hard.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern hob this is the lowest setting that keeps a lazy simmer for an hour or more. The bones need that time; then strain through a fine sieve, pressing to get everything out of the trimmings.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter and set round the edge of the dish. Add them at the table — they collapse within minutes of meeting the gravy.
- YieldThe book says four or five, but it never states how much game, so judge by the birds you have. The 10d costing covers only the ham, flour, stock and seasonings, not the game or the claret.
Salmi is the English clipping of the French salmis, itself generally traced to salmigondis, the old word for a hotchpotch of meats that also gives us "salmagundi". By the nineteenth century the term had narrowed to something quite precise, and the book opens with that distinction: a salmi is made from game deliberately left underdone, so that the carcass can be turned into a strong sauce while the flesh is finished in it, whereas a hash uses meat already cooked and cold. The dish belonged to the shooting season and to houses with game coming in, and its economy is the economy of a place with too many birds rather than too few — the whole elaborate business of ham, mace, claret and mushroom powder exists to extract the last of the flavour from bones that would otherwise go to the stockpot. Salmis were also associated with table-side finishing in a chafing dish, though the connection between that and the insistence on not boiling is a supposition rather than something the book states.