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Salmi of Duck, No. 2
INGREDIENTS.
1 pint of thin slices of duck. 2 tablespoonfuls, each, of butter and flour.
1 pint of brown stock.
1 tablespoonful of catsup.
IO or I5 drops of onion juice.
1 teaspoonful of lemon juice. 6 mushrooms, cut in pieces.
1 tablespoonful of currant jelly.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Method. - Brown the butter and make a sauce with the flour, seasoning and stock. Add the duck and mushrooms, simmer twenty minutes, add the currant jelly, and garnish with croutons.
Réchauffés and Olla-Podrida.
Sweetbreads Sautéd.
Split parboiled sweetbreads into two pieces.
Wipe dry, sprinkle with salt, pepper and flour; or season with salt and pepper, and egg-and-breadcrumb them. Sauté in the blazer in hot olive oil, or butter, until nicely browned on both sides.
Serve with French peas or tomato sauce.
A chafing-dish rechauffe built on leftover roast duck; the sauce is a brown roux thinned with stock, sharpened with catsup and lemon and rounded with currant jelly.
- The hinge: cooked duck onlyA salmi is a made dish of already-roasted game. The 20-minute simmer is meant to warm the meat and marry it with the sauce, not to cook it. Slice the meat thin off a roast duck, off the bone, and add it only once the sauce has thickened.
- "1 pint of thin slices"Meat measured by volume here: a pint of loosely packed slices is somewhere around 10 to 12 oz, i.e. a good part of the meat off one roast duck.
- Brown stockA long-simmered beef or veal stock, well reduced and unsalted. Duck or chicken stock reduced by half works as well; if using commercial broth, cut the added salt back sharply.
- "Brown the butter"The butter is browned first, the flour then worked in to make the sauce, giving a brown roux before the stock goes in. Take it to the colour of hazelnut shells over moderate heat, stirring; burnt roux turns the whole dish bitter and loses thickening power.
- CatsupIn cookbooks of this period the word could still mean mushroom or walnut catsup, thin, dark and savoury, though tomato catsup was by then common too. If using modern tomato ketchup, expect a sweeter result.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. Ten to fifteen drops is well under a quarter teaspoon, enough for aroma without cloudiness.
- Currant jelly lastThe recipe adds it after the simmer, at the end. Stir until dissolved and taste before adding salt; the jelly and the catsup both carry sugar and acid.
- Blazer heatA chafing dish over a spirit lamp gives a gentle heat suited to the simmer. On a modern burner keep the pan at a bare tremble, or the sauce reduces past thickness and the duck toughens.
- YieldServes three or four as a light course, with the croutons as garnish.
A salmi (French salmis) is a classic use for roast game: the bird is carved, the trimmings and bones go into a strong brown sauce, and the flesh is reheated in it, most often with a note of fruit jelly and something acid to cut the fat. Duck, wild or domestic, was the standard subject, and the currant jelly here reflects the long-standing English pairing of tart red preserves with rich fowl. That the recipe appears among chafing-dish dishes is the point of the section: around the turn of the twentieth century the chafing dish was a fashionable piece of parlour and late-supper equipment, and a salmi was ideal for it, since the cooking was really nothing more than a sauce and a warming through of meat left from an earlier dinner. Books of the period grouped such dishes under headings like rechauffes - literally "reheated" - a polite name for planned economy.