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WOODCOCK, SALMI OF (a la Lucullus)
Ude's recipe.--For this dish you must be particular in having the woodcocks very much underdone; then take out the intestines, and with the addition of two or three fat livers of fowls make the following forcemeat:--Take half a dozen mushrooms chopped very fine, a shallot and some parsley the same; fry these herbs in a small bit of butter. When they are nearly done, put the fat, livers, and the intestines of the woodcocks to fry with them, and when done put the whole into a mortar and pound them very fine; season with salt and pepper, etc.; rub this through a tamis; then, as three woodcocks give you six fillets, cut six bits of bread of the same shape, fry them of a nice colour, then spread the farce (forcemeat) equally divided over the six pieces of bread, put them into the oven, and when they are a good colour serve them between each of the fillets; as for the sauce, you make it with the trimmings as usual for salmi; this, well managed, is a delicious dish. The sauce must be made early, so as to keep the fillets in it to prevent them from drying; then warm them without boiling, for boiling would make the dish good for nothing. Serve the legs in the middle.
A high-Regency game dish reprinted from Ude, written for cooks who already knew how a salmis was assembled. Two things carry it: the birds must stay rare, and the finished fillets must never see a boil.
- Never let the sauce boilThe fillets are roasted underdone, then held in warm sauce and brought up only to serving heat. Once the liquid simmers, the breast meat seizes and greys, and, as Ude says, the dish is good for nothing. Keep the sauce hot but well below a simmer.
- What a salmi actually isA salmis is a two-stage game dish: the bird is part-roasted, the breasts are lifted off, and the carcass and trimmings are pounded and simmered with stock, wine or Madeira to make the sauce, which is then strained. "As usual for salmi" assumes you know that; make the sauce first so the fillets have somewhere to rest.
- The trailWoodcock is traditionally cooked undrawn, and the "intestines" here are the trail, prized for flavour. In this recipe they are fried with the mushrooms and livers, so they are cooked through before pounding.
- Fat fowl liversOrdinary chicken livers, trimmed of any green-stained parts. Ude asks for two or three to three birds.
- TamisA tamis is a fine drum sieve of horsehair or fabric. A stiff nylon sieve and a plastic scraper do the same job, or work the pounded mixture in a small food processor and then push it through to catch sinew.
- Oven for the croutesThe bread is fried first, spread with the forcemeat, then set in the oven only long enough to colour and set the farce; Ude gives no temperature or time. Any longer and the croutes dry out.
- Yield and platingThree woodcocks give six fillets and six croutes: a first course for six, or a main for three. The legs go in the centre of the dish, fillets and croutes alternating around them.
- SourcingWoodcock is not a supermarket bird. In Britain it is a game species with a limited season and its numbers are of conservation concern; in North America the American woodcock is a migratory game bird that cannot legally be sold. In practice this means a shooting supplier, a licensed game dealer in season, or a hunter. Snipe or quail can stand in, though quail lacks the trail.
- Rare gameDeliberately underdone wild birds carry the usual risks of rare poultry, campylobacter and salmonella among them. That is inherent to the dish rather than a flaw in the writing, but it is worth knowing before serving it to anyone frail, pregnant or immunocompromised.
Louis Eustache Ude was among the best-known chefs in early nineteenth-century London: French-trained, cook to the Earl of Sefton, later in charge of the kitchen at Crockford's club in St James's, and author of The French Cook (1813), which ran through many editions and was still being quarried by compilers like Cassell's decades later. The dish's second name salutes Lucullus, the Roman general whose banquets made his name a byword for luxury dining. The salmis technique itself belongs to the older French game repertoire, a way of getting two dishes' worth of flavour from a small bird by roasting the breasts briefly and boiling the rest down for sauce. Woodcock earned its place at the top of that repertoire partly through the trail, which cooks valued highly enough that the bird was, and often still is, roasted undrawn.