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SALMAGUNDI (another way)
Take cold fowl, or turkey, or veal, or all three together. Chop the meat very small, separating the white from the brown, and putting among the latter the brown part of the veal, if it be roasted. By the brown meat is understood the legs and backs of the poultry. Chop likewise the lean of some cold ham, a few boned anchovies washed, a handful of picked parsley, half a dozen shallots, some pickled gherkins, the yolks and whites separate of six hard-boiled eggs, and some roasted beetroot, after it has become cold. Now butter a basin, and place it with the bottom upwards upon a dish. Lay round this basin a ring of chopped white meat an inch and a half wide and about an inch high; then lay upon this a ring of ham, then a ring of brown meat, then one of white of egg, then one of meat, then one of yolk of egg, then one of parsley, then one of anchovies, and so on, until the whole of the materials are used up and the basin is covered, crowning the whole with a roof of beetroot garnished with a few pickled mushrooms. The sauce must be served up in a sauce tureen. It is made thus. Rub a couple of good tea-spoonfuls of strong mustard from the mustard-pot with three table-spoonfuls of salad-oil, some salt, and a little cayenne pepper. When it has become a stiff paste, add gradually one table-spoonful of white-wine vinegar, the juice of three of four lemons, a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, two table-spoonfuls of raw capers, and a tea-spoonful of soy. Should the sauce not be sufficiently thin, add more lemon-juice or vinegar.
This is a composed cold-meat salad built as a dome, and the assembly matters more than the ingredients: every element must be chopped fine and dry, or the rings will slump into one another. Read the whole method before you start, since the basin is used as a mould, not a mixing bowl.
- The basin is upside downButter a pudding basin lightly (softened, not melted, butter) and invert it on a serving dish. The chopped rings are laid on the outside of the dome, working from the plate upward until the basin disappears. The butter is there only to help the first layers cling.
- Chop fine and press dryEach component should be chopped to a coarse mince, roughly uniform, and blotted — especially the gherkins, beetroot and anchovies. Wet ingredients bleed colour into the neighbouring rings and the whole structure loses its definition within minutes.
- White and brown meatThe distinction is worth keeping: breast meat for the white rings, leg and back meat plus any darker roasted veal for the brown. A roast chicken, a slice of ham off the bone and leftover roast veal will do; two of the three is enough.
- AnchoviesThe original assumes whole salted anchovies, which needed boning and a wash to shed salt. Modern oil-packed fillets are already boned and much milder — drain them and use about 6 to 8 fillets, chopped.
- Shallots and gherkinsBoth are listed among the chopped items but never assigned a ring. Treat them as extra layers of their own, or scatter the shallot between rings for sharpness; half a dozen shallots is a great deal, so taste as you go.
- Soy and mushroom ketchup"Soy" here means soy sauce, sold in Victorian grocers as a bottled condiment; a teaspoonful of dark soy is the equivalent. Mushroom ketchup is still made commercially and is thin, black and salty — Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute, used sparingly.
- Sauce proportionsA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. The juice of three or four lemons against three tablespoons of oil gives a very sharp dressing by modern taste; start with one lemon, build the mustard-and-oil paste first as directed so it emulsifies, then thin to the consistency you want.
- Capers"Raw" capers simply means uncooked ones straight from the jar or brine. Rinse them if they are salt-packed, and chop them roughly so they distribute through the sauce.
- Timing and yieldAssemble no more than an hour before serving and keep it refrigerated; the beetroot roof will begin to run once it warms. The recipe gives no basin size or number of servings; scale the basin to the quantity of meat you have, with the sauce passed separately.
Salmagundi comes into English in the seventeenth century from the French salmigondis, a word for a hotchpotch or medley, and the dish followed the word: a plate of cold cooked meats, eggs, pickles, anchovies and herbs, arranged rather than mixed. Hannah Glasse gives a "Salamongundy" in 1747, and the arrangement of ingredients in rings or compartments — sometimes on a dish, sometimes heaped over an inverted basin as here — was a standing feature of the English cold table into the nineteenth century. Its usefulness is plain from where Cassell's places it: this is a way of turning the remains of a roast fowl, a joint of veal and the end of a ham into something that looks deliberate, at a time when a large household expected cold meat to reappear at supper and luncheon for days. The metaphorical sense outlived the culinary one, which is why Washington Irving and his collaborators could call their 1807 satirical magazine Salmagundi and expect readers to understand it as a jumble of odds and ends.