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Wild Fowl, Salmi Of
Cut off the legs, wings, breast, and rump of the wild goose, duck, widgeon, or teal, and put them by for the salmi. The head, neck, back, and giblets, if they are preserved, constitute the parings. Cut four shallots into several pieces, and put them into a very clean stewpan. If a plain salmi is wanted it will be necessary only to add a slice of butter, a bay-leaf, a small piece of mace, and half a dozen peppercorns. Let the whole fry until the ingredients are lightly coloured; then dredge in a third of a spoonful of flour, and continue to fry until this is brown; but be careful that the other ingredients do not burn. Now put in a large glass of red wine and double that quantity of veal gravy, together with the parings of the wild fowl. Season with pepper and salt, and let the whole simmer gently during an hour and a half. Then strain the gravy through a hair sieve over the meat for the salmi, which must be ready in another stewpan. Stand this near the fire to get gradually and slowly hot through, but be especially careful that it does not boil. Give it a dash of cayenne pepper. When about to dish up, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.
A salmi is a reheating dish: the bird is carved, a sauce is built from the trimmings, and the two are brought together off the boil. The instructions assume you already have roasted wild fowl on hand.
- Start with cooked meatSalmi was made from birds already roasted, usually deliberately underdone, and the joints are only warmed through in the finished sauce. Since the sauce must never boil, the meat has to be fully cooked before it goes in — raw joints will not reach a safe temperature by this method.
- The hinge: no boilingOnce the strained sauce goes over the meat, keep it below a simmer. Boiling toughens the fibres of lean wild duck almost immediately and turns the breast grey and dry. A pan set over the lowest heat, or in a 200F oven, holds it correctly.
- Wine and gravy quantitiesA wineglass of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz; "large glass" is not a defined measure, so take it as roughly 3-4 fl oz of red wine, with double that quantity of veal gravy, as the recipe directs. Scale both up proportionally if you are working with a goose rather than a teal.
- Veal gravyThis means a brown veal stock reduced until it has body, a standard sauce base in Victorian cookery books. A good unsalted brown chicken or veal stock, reduced by half, or a spoonful of demi-glace loosened with stock, does the same work.
- "A third of a spoonful of flour"Genuinely vague: the size of the spoon is unspecified. Treat it as about a teaspoon for the quantity of liquid given, enough to lightly bind rather than thicken.
- Mace and the paringsA "small piece of mace" is a fragment of blade mace, not the ground powder; about 1/4 teaspoon ground if that is what you have. The parings -- head, neck, back, giblets (the recipe allows that the giblets may not have been kept) -- are what give the sauce its depth.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh strainer. Press the solids firmly to extract the gravy, then discard them; the bones and aromatics have given up everything useful in the hour and a half.
- YieldOne wild duck or a pair of widgeon serves two; teal are small enough to allow one bird per person; a wild goose will stretch to four or five. Serve with fried croutons or toast to take up the sauce.
Salmi (also salmis) is generally taken to be a shortening of the French salmigondis, an old word for a hotchpotch or ragout of mixed meats, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed to mean one particular treatment of game: the bird roasted, jointed, and finished in a sauce built from its own carcass and trimmings. It belongs to the same logic as the press-and-reduce preparations of wildfowl -- nothing of the bird is wasted, and the flavour of the frame is returned to the flesh. Cassell's places it in the wildfowl section, among the birds a household might be given or shot, and it offers a way to serve birds that had already appeared roasted at table. The insistence that the sauce must not boil suits lean wild birds in particular: a domestic duck will forgive a hard simmer, a teal will not.