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Salmi of Duck
Cut cold roast duck in pieces for serving. Reheat in Spanish Sauce.
Spanish Sauce.
Melt one-fourth cup butter, add one tablespoon finely chopped onion, a stalk of celery, two slices carrot cut in pieces, and two tablespoons finely chopped lean raw ham. Cook until butter is brown, then add one-fourth cup flour, and when well browned add two cups Consommé, bit of bay leaf, sprig of parsley, blade of mace, two cloves, one-half teaspoon salt, and one-eighth teaspoon pepper; cook five minutes. Strain, add duck, and when reheated add Sherry wine, stoned olives, and mushrooms cut in quarters. Arrange on dish for serving, and garnish with olives and mushrooms. Grouse may be used in place of duck.
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A leftovers dish dressed as a company dish: cold roast duck reheated in a brown sauce. The sauce is the whole recipe, and it lives or dies on how far you take the roux.
- The hinge: brown the flour properlyThe butter and vegetables are cooked until the butter browns, then the flour is browned again after it goes in. That means five to eight minutes of steady stirring over medium heat until the flour smells toasted and turns the colour of peanut shells. Stop short and the sauce tastes pasty; take it black and it turns bitter and loses thickening power.
- ConsomméConsomme -- Two cups of clear, well-seasoned beef or veal stock. Canned broth works but is generally saltier than a homemade consomme, so hold back the half teaspoon of salt until after you have tasted the strained sauce.
- Blade of maceMace is the outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one whole dried piece of it. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace is the usual stand-in, added with the other aromatics -- but note that ground mace will not be caught by the strainer as a whole blade would.
- Lean raw hamUncooked cured ham, not cooked deli ham. Prosciutto trimmings or a piece of unsmoked salt pork or pancetta give the same salty, savoury base. Two tablespoons, chopped fine, so it renders quickly in the butter.
- Unmeasured additionsThe sherry, olives and mushrooms have no quantities, which is normal for this era of writing. For two cups of sauce, two to three tablespoons of dry sherry, half a cup of pitted green olives and about four ounces of quartered mushrooms is in proportion. Add the sherry off the boil so it keeps its perfume.
- "Stoned olives"Pitted. Olives were commonly sold whole and pitted at home in this period; jarred pitted olives are the modern equivalent, though they are usually brinier and worth a rinse.
- Reheating the duckThe cold duck only needs to come up to temperature in the strained sauce, a few minutes at a bare simmer. Cooked duck leg holds up well; breast meat sliced thin will go grey and dry if it sits in hot sauce for long, so add it last.
- Grouse and yieldThe substitution note assumes wild game, which is far leaner and stronger-flavoured than duck; wild birds want a shorter reheat still. One roast duck carcass picked over serves two to three with rice, noodles or toast points.
Salmi (also salmis, a name usually traced to the French salmigondis, a hotchpotch or ragout, though the derivation is not certain) was the classic restaurant treatment for game already cooked or partly cooked: the bird carved, the trimmings turned into a dark sauce, the pieces finished in it at the last minute. In French practice the sauce was often built on the pounded carcass and liver, which is what gives a true salmis its depth; the version here substitutes a straightforward brown sauce with raw ham and a strained aromatic garnish, which is both easier and more forgiving in a home kitchen. The note that grouse may be used reflects a period when wild birds still reached American tables in quantity and when a cook was expected to have a plan for yesterday's roast rather than throw it out. The Spanish Sauce named here belongs to the same family as espagnole, the brown mother sauce of nineteenth-century cookery, scaled down to two cups.