Home › The Principles of Cookery › Grouse, Salmi Of
Grouse, Salmi Of
Pick and draw a brace of grouse. Roast them for twenty minutes before a clear fire. Take them up, and, when cold, carve them into neat joints. Take off the skin and trimmings, chop them small, and put them into a saucepan with a bay-leaf, a small sprig of thyme, a sliced shallot, and one table-spoonful of salad-oil. Fry until lightly browned, then add half a pint of brown sauce, and simmer gently for a quarter of an hour. Strain the gravy, skim off the fat, and add a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, a little salt and cayenne, and a glass of sherry. Put in the grouse, and let them remain until quite hot, but on no account let them boil. Put the birds in the centre of a hot dish, boil up the gravy, pour it round them, and garnish with fried sippets. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the grouse and wine. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A classic salmi: the birds are deliberately under-roasted, then finished in a sauce built from their own skin and trimmings. Everything depends on the second cooking being gentle.
- Never let it boilOnce the jointed grouse go into the sauce they need only to heat through over a low flame, a few minutes. A boil tightens the fibres of lean game meat and turns rare breast grey and dry.
- A braceTwo birds. Red grouse are small, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb each dressed; the recipe's claim of six or seven servings presumably assumes a place in a longer dinner, since as a main course a brace serves two to three.
- The 20-minute roastBefore a clear fire means high, direct radiant heat. A hot oven, roughly 425-450F for 15-20 minutes, is an approximate modern substitute: breasts still pink, because they will be cooked again in the sauce.
- Brown sauceIn Victorian kitchens usually a roux-based brown stock sauce, often of the espagnole type. A well-reduced brown game or veal stock, lightly thickened, does the same job. Half a pint here is an imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or about 1 1/4 cups.
- Salad-oil and a glass of sherrySalad-oil meant olive oil, usually a mild one. A wine glass of the period runs about 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz; use a dry amontillado or oloroso rather than anything sweet.
- Spoon sizesA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons, so the lemon juice is a modest 10 ml. Add it after straining and taste before adding more -- the sherry already brings acidity.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp, set point-up around the dish. Fry them at the last minute or they soften in the gravy.
- SourcingRed grouse cannot be farmed and appear only in season, from mid-August, through game dealers. Guinea fowl, partridge or pigeon breast take the same treatment, with shorter roasting for pigeon.
A salmi (generally traced to the French salmigondis, a ragout of mixed meats) was the standard second life of roast game birds in nineteenth-century cookery: the bird is roasted rare, jointed, and the carcass, skin and trimmings are pressed into service as the base of the sauce, so that nothing of the flavour is wasted. Red grouse, which reach English tables only after the twelfth of August, were both prestigious and expensive -- hence the costing of "8d., exclusive of the grouse and wine," which prices the sauce and quietly declines to price the birds. The dish belonged to the dinner-party repertoire, where a salmi could be assembled from birds roasted earlier in the day, and its cardinal rule is the one stated here: the sauce must be hot but must not boil.