Home › The Principles of Cookery › PARTRIDGES, SALMI OF (a la Francaise)
PARTRIDGES, SALMI OF (a la Francaise)
Roast a brace of well-hung young partridges, baste them liberally, and take them down when they are only three-parts cooked. Let them get cold; then cut them into neat joints, remove the skin, fat, and sinew, and put the good parts aside, being careful to cover them, and keep them in a cool place to prevent their becoming hard. Melt three ounces of fresh butter in a saucepan. Put with it a dozen small mushrooms, a scraped carrot, two sliced shallots, half a blade of mace, a bay-leaf, a handful of parsley-leaves, a medium-sized onion, stuck with two cloves, a small sprig of thyme, and four ounces of uncooked lean ham, cut into small pieces. Stir these over a gentle fire until they are lightly browned, sprinkle over them a table-spoonful of flour, let it brown slightly, and then stir in, very gradually, a pint of good veal gravy and a glassful of sherry. Add the bones and trimmings of the birds, and boil the sauce gently until it is considerably reduced; then strain it, let it boil up once more, put in the pieces of partridge, and when they are quite hot, dish the salmi, and serve immediately. Garnish the dish with toasted sippets. When mushrooms cannot be obtained, their place may be supplied by a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Time, an hour and a half to simmer the sauce. Probable cost, 1s. 6d., exclusive of the partridges. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A two-stage dish: the birds are roasted rare, then finished in a reduced game sauce. Everything depends on how gently that second stage is handled.
- The hinge: never boil the meat in the sauceThe partridge joints go into the strained sauce only to heat through, two or three minutes at a bare simmer. Any real boiling and lean game breast turns dry and fibrous, which is precisely what the three-parts roasting was meant to avoid.
- A brace, and what "well-hung" meansA brace is two birds. Well-hung meant game aged several days in a cool larder to tenderise and deepen flavour; a butcher's or supplier's oven-ready partridge today has been hung briefly if at all, so expect a milder result. Two birds yield perhaps four modest portions rather than the six claimed, which assumes bread and other courses alongside.
- Three-parts cookedThe recipe gives no temperature or time, only the instruction to take the birds down under-roasted. In a hot oven this is a matter of minutes rather than a full roast; the breast should still be pink. Cool completely before jointing; warm birds tear rather than cut cleanly.
- Veal gravyThis means a proper brown veal stock, not a thickened gravy. A good unsalted veal or chicken stock will do; the ham and the bird trimmings supply most of the savour anyway.
- A glassful of sherryA Victorian wine glass is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fluid ounces, so about a quarter cup. Use dry or medium-dry sherry, not cream sherry.
- Uncooked lean hamRaw cured ham, not boiled sandwich ham. Pancetta or a piece of unsmoked gammon gives the intended salt-and-fat backbone.
- An hour and a half of simmeringThat is for the sauce alone, with the bones in, boiled gently until 'considerably reduced' as the recipe puts it. The long reduction is the point; do not shorten it, and do not salt until after straining, or the finished sauce will be too strong.
- Mushroom ketchupThe Victorian substitute is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold by specialist grocers. It is not tomato ketchup, and a tablespoon of soy sauce plus a few dried mushrooms is closer in effect than anything else on a modern shelf.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast or fried bread, set around the rim of the dish to soak up the sauce.
A salmi (French salmis, generally traced to the same root as salmigondis, a hotchpotch) is the classic French treatment for roasted game: the bird is under-roasted, carved, and its carcass simmered into a strong sauce in which the joints are then reheated. It was a dish of both economy and refinement, since it extracts a second, deeper flavour from bones that would otherwise be discarded, while allowing the cook to serve game already broken down into neat, forkable pieces. Cassell's was addressed to the middle-class British household of the later nineteenth century. The costing here, one and sixpence 'exclusive of the partridges', leaves the price of the birds themselves out of the reckoning.