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Salmi of Game or Wild Fowl
Put the birds down to the fire as for roasting, and take them up when they are less than half done. Cut them into neat pieces, and remove the skin, fat, and sinew from the legs, wings, and breasts. Place the joints side by side in a clean saucepan, cover them, and keep them in a cool place till wanted. Take a quarter of a pound of uncooked lean ham, mince it finely, put it into a well-tinned saucepan, and shake it over the fire for three or four minutes with a slice of fresh butter. Add to it a dozen button mushrooms, a scraped carrot, a handful of parsley, a sprig of thyme, three shallots (or more), finely minced, four cloves, two bay-leaves, a blade of mace, and half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns. Mix these ingredients, and stir them over a gentle fire till the sides of the saucepan appear slightly coloured, dredge a table-spoonful of flour over the contents, and let it brown a little, then pour in gradually a pint of good veal stock and two glassfuls of sherry. Put in the bruised bodies of the birds, let the sauce boil up, then draw the saucepan to the side, and let its contents simmer gently until the sauce is smooth, thick, and pleasantly flavoured. Carefully remove the scum as it rises. Clear the sauce from fat, strain, pour it over the joints of game in the saucepan, let these heat in it very slowly, and when the liquid is just about to boil, dish them. Pour the sauce over the game, and garnish the dish with fried sippets. The salmi may be made less expensive by the omission of the mushrooms and wine. When moor fowl or black game are used, care should be taken to remove the bitter spongy substance from the body of the birds, if they have been well hung, or the flavour of the salmis will be spoilt. Time, an hour to an hour and a half to simmer the sauce.
A salmi is a two-stage dish: the birds are roasted only part way, then the joints are warmed through in a rich sauce built from their own carcasses. Everything depends on the second heating never reaching a boil.
- The hingeOnce the strained sauce goes over the joints, bring them up slowly and dish them as the liquid trembles. Boiling game breast that has already seen the fire squeezes it dry and stringy in a minute or two.
- "Less than half done"Roast the birds only briefly, until the outside has coloured and the flesh is still red at the bone; the book gives neither time nor temperature. Joint them while barely warm; the carcass then goes into the sauce.
- Holding the jointsA Victorian "cool place" might be a stone larder, cellar or meat safe. Cover and refrigerate the jointed birds, and when they are reheated in the sauce make sure they come through to 165F at the thickest part of the leg before serving.
- Glassfuls and pintsA wine glassful is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so two glassfuls is roughly half a cup of sherry. The pint of veal stock is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or just under 2 1/2 US cups.
- Well-tinned saucepanThe tinning kept the wine and stock off bare copper. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the job now.
- The bitter spongy substanceOn red grouse (moor fowl) and blackcock this means the lungs and any remnants of the trail clinging inside the ribs, which turn acrid in a hung bird. Scrape the cavity clean with a small spoon before the carcass goes into the pot.
- Aromatics in modern termsA blade of mace is a piece of the lacy aril that covers the nutmeg seed; about 1/4 teaspoon ground mace substitutes. Three shallots gives roughly 1/4 to 1/2 cup minced depending on size, and the recipe allows more.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp. Fry them at the last moment so they do not soften in the sauce.
- YieldTwo grouse or partridges, or one pheasant, will serve two to three with the sauce and sippets. The sauce itself wants the full hour to an hour and a half to draw flavour from the bruised carcasses and reduce to coating thickness.
Salmi is the English clipping of the French salmis, itself generally traced to salmigondis, an old word for a hotchpotch or ragout of mixed meats. In nineteenth-century professional cookery it came to mean something quite precise: game roasted only part way, carved, and finished in a sauce made from the pounded carcasses, so that nothing of the bird was wasted. The form suited both the restaurant, where a salmi could be assembled from birds started earlier in the day, and the sporting household with more grouse and pheasant than it could roast plainly. The recipe itself notes that it may be made "less expensive by the omission of the mushrooms and wine."