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Salmi of Turkey
From the carcass of a turkey strip the meat, dicing the larger pieces; put the bits through the chopper, break the carcass and put in the stock pot. For a salmi cook together 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, 1 tablespoonful each of chopped celery, onion and carrots and 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped raw ham. When browned add 2 tablespoonfuls of flour and brown again, then add 1 pint of thinned turkey gravy, ¼ of a bay leaf, ½ of a blade of mace, 2 cloves and salt and pepper to taste. Stir and cook for five minutes, strain it over the diced turkey meat and return to the fire for ten minutes' slow cooking. Add 2 dozen stoned olives and 2 tablespoonfuls of sherry and take from the fire. Garnish with toast points and a little chopped parsley.
A leftovers dish built on a proper brown sauce; the sauce is the work and the turkey is only reheated in it. Read the fractions with care, since the original typesetting has garbled some of them.
- Mace and bay leafThe recipe calls for a quarter of a bay leaf and half a blade of mace, a blade being one whole piece of the lacy covering of a nutmeg. If you only have ground mace, a pinch of about 1/8 teaspoon stands in.
- The hinge: do not boil the meatThe turkey is already cooked. It goes into strained hot sauce for ten minutes of the barest simmer, no more, or the fibres tighten and the diced breast turns to sawdust. Keep the pan at a lazy bubble at the edges.
- Chopped raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham — prosciutto, speck, or a thick trimming of country ham — used as a flavour base, not a bacon substitute. Two tablespoons finely chopped is enough; it browns in the butter and is discarded with the strained vegetables.
- Thinned turkey gravyIf you have no gravy from the bird, use a pint of the stock made from the broken carcass. The mirepoix and two tablespoons of flour are already there to thicken it, so the liquid should be thin enough to pour freely.
- Browning the rouxCook the flour in the fat until it smells nutty and reaches the colour of peanut butter, several minutes over medium heat. An underbrowned roux leaves the sauce pale and pasty.
- Strain, then don't skip itThe recipe strains the sauce over the meat, which is the point of a salmi: the vegetables and spices give flavour and are then removed. Press the solids firmly in the sieve to get the sauce out of them.
- Olives and sherry go in off the heatTwo dozen stoned olives will be salty; taste the sauce for salt only after they are in. A dry sherry (fino or amontillado, not cream) suits the dish, and adding it at the end keeps its aroma rather than cooking it flat.
- YieldProbably about four servings, though the recipe gives none, and it depends on how much meat came off the carcass. Toast points are triangles of toast, and they are best cut and toasted at the last minute.
A salmi (French salmis) was traditionally a way of finishing game: the bird was partly roasted, carved, and the trimmings and carcass pounded and simmered into a rich brown sauce in which the pieces were gently reheated, usually with wine and often with olives or truffles. Nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks borrowed the term freely and applied it to any cooked poultry served in a strong brown sauce, which is what has happened here. The whole method exists to make a late day of a turkey worth eating, using the carcass for stock and the small pieces for the dish itself, with two tablespoons of sherry and a handful of olives doing the work of disguising the fact that it is leftovers. The instruction to "break the carcass and put in the stock pot" was simply how a careful kitchen operated.