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Chafing-dish Dainties (Into the hot blazer turn again)
into the hot blazer, turn again and again with a fork, keeping the blazer very hot. When the bits of meat are heated throughout, squeeze them, one by one, with the lemon-squeezer, into a hot bowl.
Season with salt and serve at once.
Salmi of Duck or Game.
Pieces of game.
INGREDIENTS. 1/3 a cup, each, of butter and flour.
1 tablespoonful, each, of carrot and onion slices. 2 cups of rich brown stock, highly seasoned. ¼ a cup of madeira.
1 cup of peas or flageolets, cooked.
Method. Cook the butter, onion and carrot in the blazer until well browned. Skim out the onion and carrot and add the flour, pepper and salt. Add the stock. As soon as the sauce is cooked, add the madeira, the pieces of game, and the peas or flageolets. Serve as soon as the meat is hot.
A salmi is a reheating dish: the game is already roasted, and the blazer only brings it up to temperature in a finished sauce. Overcooking at this stage is the one thing that ruins it.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set over the flame directly rather than over the hot-water bath. Any wide, heavy skillet or saute pan does the same work on a modern burner.
- Use cooked gameThe duck or game is meant to be leftover roast, carved into serving pieces. Raw meat added at this point will not cook through before the sauce breaks; roast or braise it first and add it only to warm.
- Do not boil the meat in the sauce"Serve as soon as the meat is hot" is the hinge. Duck and game breast held at a simmer turns grey and dry within a few minutes; two or three minutes of gentle heat is enough.
- The roux is heavyA third of a cup each of butter and flour to two cups of stock gives a very thick, almost paste-like sauce by current taste. Slacken it with additional stock until it coats a spoon, or reduce the butter and flour to about three tablespoons each.
- Brown stock"Rich brown stock, highly seasoned" means a reduced roasted-bone stock, not a light broth. Commercial low-sodium beef or veal stock reduced by a third comes close; season aggressively, since the flour will mute it.
- MadeiraRead the wine measure as 1/4 cup. Use a dry or medium Sercial or Verdelho rather than a sweet cream Madeira, and add it off the boil so the aroma survives.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green French shell beans, sold dried or tinned. Cooked and drained, they stand in for peas; either should already be tender before it meets the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity of game and gives no yield. Judging by the two cups of sauce, roughly a pound of picked meat would suit, serving about four as a light supper or first course.
Salmi is a contraction of the French salmis, itself generally traced to salmigondis, an old word for a hotchpotch of meats; in classical French kitchens it named a ragout built from game that had already been roasted, the carcass and trimmings pounded into the sauce. Its appearance in a chafing-dish book is no accident. The chafing dish was the fashionable American supper apparatus of the 1890s and 1900s, worked at the table in the dining room or after the theatre, and its whole repertoire depends on ingredients that need warming rather than cooking: creamed oysters, welsh rarebit, lobster Newburg, and dishes like this one that turn the remains of a roast duck into something a hostess could produce in front of guests in ten minutes.