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Salmis of Duck
Take a cold roasted duck; cut off the fillets, trim them and put in a stewpan with a little salt and allspice; add one teacupful of olive oil and a wineglassful of claret; stir over the fire until the fillets are hot through, then dish and serve.
A stripped-down salmis: no stock, no sieved carcass sauce, just duck breast warmed through in oil and claret. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat, since the fillets are already cooked and will toughen fast.
- The filletsThese are the two breasts off a cold roast duck, skin trimmed neat and any sinew removed. Slice them on the bias into thin escalopes before heating so they warm through in a minute or two rather than stewing.
- A teacupfulTeacup measures were not standardised; period sources put a teacupful anywhere between about 4 fl oz (a gill) and 6 fl oz (3/4 cup). Either way that is a great deal of olive oil for two breasts; half that amount is enough to coat them, and the rest only pools in the pan.
- A wineglassfulAbout 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Claret means dry red Bordeaux, or any dry, unoaked red.
- Heat controlKeep the pan below a simmer. The point is to warm cooked meat, not cook it again; two or three minutes of turning in the warm oil and wine is the whole operation. Boiling will split the oil out and make the duck grey and dry.
- AllspiceGround allspice berries, not a mixed pie spice. A generous pinch is plenty against the wine; more turns medicinal.
- What is missingA full salmis reduces the chopped carcass and trimmings with wine and stock, then strains the sauce over the meat. If you want that, roast the bones and legs, simmer them with the claret and a little stock, and strain; the recipe as printed gives you an oily pan juice rather than a sauce.
- ServingTwo portions from one duck. Traditionally served on fried croutons with the pan liquid spooned over, which soaks up the oil and gives the dish something to sit on.
Salmis is one of the old French restaurant treatments for game and wildfowl: the bird is roasted underdone, carved, and the carcass turned into a strong wine sauce in which the pieces are finished. The name is generally traced to salmigondis, a word for a hodgepodge of meats, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed to this specific method for duck, woodcock, pheasant and partridge. The version in the 1896 book that carries Oscar Tschirky's name -- compiled, like much of it, from hotel kitchen material -- reads as a kitchen memorandum rather than a full instruction, and it is really an economy dish: a way of turning the previous day's roast duck into a plated course at short notice, which was presumably the sort of problem a hotel kitchen the size of the Waldorf's had to solve often enough.