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Salmi, Hunter's
Divide a half-roasted pheasant or partridge into neat joints. Carefully remove the skin and sinews, and put the pieces into a saucepan. Pour over them a glassful of Lucca oil, and add a glassful of sherry or Madeira, the grated rind and juice of a lemon, and a little salt and cayenne. Let the game heat slowly over a gentle fire, and when the joints are hot through drain them, and serve with fried sippets.
A salmi in its plainest form: game already partly roasted, finished off the bone-heat of a gentle pan rather than in a made sauce. Two details decide whether it works — the state of the bird when it goes in, and the temperature it never exceeds.
- Finish the cooking, don't just warm it"Half-roasted" means the bird comes out of the oven distinctly underdone, and the pan must take it the rest of the way. Poultry and game birds should reach 165F/74C in the thickest part of the thigh; heating only until the joints feel hot through is not a reliable gauge with a bird that started underdone.
- Lucca oilOlive oil from Lucca in Tuscany, widely sold in nineteenth-century Britain as a table and salad oil. Any decent mild extra-virgin oil does the job; a heavily peppery oil will fight the sherry.
- A glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz / 60 ml (a quarter cup). So about a quarter cup of oil and the same of sherry or Madeira for one bird.
- Keep it below a simmerThe point of the gentle fire is that oil and wine at a bare tremble poach the joints; a boil will split the mixture and squeeze the game dry. Cover the pan and keep it on the lowest heat, turning the pieces once, until the joints are cooked through.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp, arranged around the dish. The recipe has you drain the joints; the oily lemon liquor is worth spooning over rather than discarding.
- Skin and sinewRemoving the skin matters more here than in a roast: without a browning sauce there is nothing to crisp it, and it turns flabby in the oil. The leg sinews of a pheasant are tough and wiry and should be pulled out at the joint.
- Sherry or MadeiraA dry amontillado or a Sercial-style Madeira suits it. Cream sherry will make the dish cloying against the lemon.
- YieldOne pheasant serves two; a partridge is a single portion. Scale the oil, wine and lemon with the number of birds.
Salmi is the clipped English form of the French salmis, itself generally traced to salmigondis, the old word for a ragout of mixed meats that also gave English "salmagundi". In classic French practice a salmis is an elaborate thing: the bird is roasted rare, jointed, and the carcass pounded and simmered into a rich sauce with wine and stock, which is then strained over the meat. This "hunter's" version strips all that away "o oil, fortified wine, lemon, cayenne "o and is the sort of thing a shooting party could manage over a fire with a bird brought back from the field, which is presumably what the name is meant to suggest.