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Salmi of Lamb
Cut cold roast lamb in thin slices. Cook five minutes two tablespoons butter with one-half tablespoon finely chopped onion. Add lamb, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with one cup Brown Sauce, or one cup cold lamb gravy seasoned with Worcestershire, Harvey, or Elizabeth Sauce. Cook until thoroughly heated. Arrange slices overlapping one another lengthwise of platter, pour around sauce, and garnish with toast points. A few sliced mushrooms or stoned olives improve this sauce.
A leftovers dish from the era when a Sunday roast was expected to reappear twice more. The whole thing hinges on gentle reheating: the lamb is already cooked, and boiling it in the sauce will turn thin slices grey and stringy.
- Heat, not cook"Cook until thoroughly heated" means bring the sauce to a bare simmer and let the slices warm through — two to three minutes at most. Any longer and cold roast lamb tightens and dries.
- Slice cold, serve hotChill the roast thoroughly before slicing; a cold joint cuts into the clean thin slices the presentation depends on. Slice against the grain and keep the pieces roughly uniform so they heat evenly.
- Brown SauceFarmer's Brown Sauce elsewhere in the book is butter and flour cooked brown, then stirred with brown stock. A cup of good beef or lamb stock thickened with butter and flour in the book's usual proportions does the same job.
- Harvey and Elizabeth SauceHarvey's was a bottled commercial condiment of the period, anchovy-and-vinegar based, in the same family as Worcestershire; Elizabeth Sauce was another of the era's bottled table sauces, though little is now recorded of what went into it. Neither is easy to find now; Worcestershire, or Worcestershire with a dash of anchovy paste and mushroom ketchup, stands in.
- Onion quantityHalf a tablespoon of chopped onion is about a teaspoon and a half — a very small amount, a slice or two off a small onion. Cooking it five minutes in the butter over low heat should soften it without browning.
- Mushrooms and olivesIf you add the suggested sliced mushrooms, sauté them separately until their water has driven off, then fold them into the sauce. Added raw they will thin the sauce as they release liquid. Stoned olives means pitted.
- Toast pointsBread toasted and cut corner to corner into triangles, tucked around the edge of the platter. They exist to soak up sauce, so cut them thick enough to hold together.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity of lamb, so the yield depends entirely on how much of the joint is left; one cup of sauce is the only fixed measure.
Salmi is an anglicised salmis, the French term for a ragout made from meat that has already been roasted — classically game birds, whose carcasses were pounded and simmered to enrich the sauce. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing in the 1890s the word was often used in American and English household cookery for little more than sliced cold roast reheated in a brown sauce and served respectably on a platter. The Boston Cooking School taught thrift as a discipline, and a chapter on lamb and mutton would be expected to account for the joint's second and third appearances as well as its first. The bottled sauces named here — Worcestershire, Harvey's, Elizabeth — are of their period, and offered a shortcut to depth of flavour in a sauce that would otherwise need long stockmaking.