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Salmi Sauce
This is a sauce for salmi of partridges, pheasants, etc. Take four shallots and a carrot cut into dice, some parsley-roots, a few bits of ham, a clove, two or three leaves of mace, the quarter of a bay-leaf, a little thyme, and a small piece of butter, with a few mushrooms. Put the whole into a stewpan over a gentle fire; let them fry till you perceive the stewpan is coloured all round. Then moisten with half a pint of Madeira and a very small lump of sugar. Let the liquor reduce to one-half. Put in six spoonfuls of Spanish sauce, and the trimmings of the partridges. Let them stew for an hour on the corner of the stove. Skim the fat off, taste whether the sauce be seasoned enough; strain it over the members, make it hot without boiling; reduce it, strain it through a tamis; then cover the salmi with it.
A classic game sauce built on the trimmings of the birds themselves. It assumes you already have espagnole on hand and a jointed roast bird waiting for it.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole — brown stock thickened with a brown roux and enriched with a mirepoix (tomato belongs to later versions of the sauce). Six spoonfuls probably means about 6 tablespoons; a well-reduced brown game or veal stock, lightly thickened, stands in for it.
- Half a pint of MadeiraAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. Use a dry or medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho); the modern sweet cooking sort will fight the lump of sugar.
- Leaves of maceBlades of mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg. If substituting ground mace, a small pinch — somewhere between ¼ and ½ teaspoon — stands in for two or three blades; here it goes in at the start with the other aromatics.
- Parsley-rootsHamburg parsley, grown for the root rather than the leaf and still sold in some markets. A small piece of parsnip plus a few parsley stalks gives a close approximation.
- Colour is the point"Fry till you perceive the stewpan is coloured all round" means cook the vegetables, ham and butter until a brown film sets on the pan bottom. That fond, deglazed by the Madeira, is where the sauce gets its depth; stopping at pale gold gives a thin result.
- On the corner of the stoveThe coolest part of a coal range — a bare simmer, barely trembling. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting with the lid ajar, for the full hour.
- Hot without boilingThe hinge of the recipe. Once the jointed bird is in the sauce, boiling squeezes the game dry and stringy; bring it to about 160-170F and hold it there just long enough to heat through.
- Members and tamis"Members" are the jointed pieces of the bird — legs, wings, breast. A tamis was a drum sieve of woven hair; a fine-mesh conical strainer does the same work.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but from the stated quantities the finished sauce reduces to roughly a cupful — enough to dress a small salmi.
A salmi (French salmis, often traced to the older salmigondis, a hotchpotch, though the derivation is uncertain) is a two-stage game dish: the bird is roasted until barely done, carved, and the carcass and trimmings are then used to build a sauce in which the pieces are gently reheated. It belonged to the elaborate service of nineteenth-century French cooking, and nothing was wasted that could go back into the pan — bones, skin and scraps all went in. Cassell's places the recipe among the sauces rather than the game dishes, and it presupposes a cook with espagnole already simmering at the back of the range. The instruction to work on "the corner of the stove" is a relic of the coal range, whose fixed fire made a cook navigate by position rather than by dial.