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SALMI SAUCE (another way)
Scrape the red part of a carrot, and put the pulp into a saucepan with a bay-leaf, a bunch parsley, a sprig of thyme, three or four pieces of bacon or blanched bacon-rind, three shallots chopped fine, and the bruised trimmings of the game to be used for the salmi. Add a slice of fresh butter, or a table-spoonful of Lucca oil, and stir the ingredients over the fire till they are lightly browned. Moisten them gradually with half a pint of good brown sauce and a glassful of sherry and Madeira. Stew all gently together till the sauce is very good, skim and strain it, season with pepper and salt, and it will be ready for the game. Time, one hour or more. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A classic game sauce built on trimmings and aromatics, thickened by an already-made brown sauce rather than by flour added here. Everything depends on having the brown sauce and the bones on hand before you start.
- Brown sauce means espagnoleBrown sauce -- "Good brown sauce" here means the brown foundation sauce of the period, broadly of the espagnole family: a brown roux moistened with strong veal or beef stock and simmered down at length, though English versions of the day were often simpler and shorter than the French classic. A reduced dark stock thickened lightly with beurre manie, or a good demi-glace, stands in for it.
- Half a pintBritish imperial, so 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Together with the wine this yields roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of finished sauce after skimming and straining.
- A glassful of sherry and MadeiraGenuinely vague. A Victorian wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz; the phrase may mean a glassful of each, some 4 fl oz in all, or a single glassful of the two combined. Use a dry or medium sherry and a drier Madeira such as Sercial or Verdelho rather than a sweet one.
- Lucca oilNineteenth-century British shorthand for the olive oil shipped from Lucca in Tuscany, then the standard quality benchmark. Any decent olive oil serves; butter gives the rounder result with game.
- Scraping the carrotOnly the outer coloured layer is wanted, scraped to a pulp, because the pale core is woody and comparatively flavourless. Grating a peeled carrot on the fine side of a box grater does the same job faster.
- Blanched bacon-rindRind and offcuts were simmered a few minutes in water first to draw out excess salt and any smoke harshness. Worth doing if your bacon is heavily cured, since the sauce reduces and the salt concentrates.
- The game trimmingsBruised means crushed, with the flat of a knife or a mallet, to break up the bones and release their juices. Necks, backs, wing tips and other scraps from the birds going into the salmi are what is meant; without them the sauce is closer to a plain Madeira sauce.
- Keep it below a boilThe hour of stewing should be a bare tremble. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the sauce so it will not skim clear, and the finished sauce turns cloudy and greasy rather than glossy.
- Strain properlyPress the solids in a fine sieve, then pass the sauce a second time through a clean sieve or muslin. Season only at this point, after reduction, or the bacon and the reduced stock will carry it past salty.
A salmi (from the French salmis, generally traced to the older salmigondis, a hotchpotch) is a two-stage game dish: the birds are partly roasted, jointed, and finished in a rich sauce made from their own trimmings. It belonged to the roast-course economy of the nineteenth-century kitchen, where a brace of partridge or a woodcock carcass carried enough flavour in the bones alone to justify an hour on the stove. The method is a lesson in how a compound sauce is constructed: aromatics and bones browned in fat, moistened with a finished brown sauce, fortified with sherry and Madeira, then skimmed and strained to nothing but liquid. The presence of two fortified wines is telling. Both were staples of the Victorian British cellar, imported in quantity and used as freely in the kitchen as at the table, and Madeira in particular survived in cookery long after fashion had turned against drinking it.