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Salmis of Grouse
Singe, draw, wipe and truss two grouse, season with salt, put a few small pieces of butter over them, place them in a roastingpan in a brisk oven, and cook for eight or ten minutes. Untruss and cut away the wings, legs and breasts. Place one ounce of butter in a saucepan with about one-half a carrot cut into small pieces, half an onion cut the same, two bay leaves, a sprig of thyme, and six whole peppers, and fry to a golden color, which will take about five or six minutes. Hash the bodies of the two grouse and add them to the other ingredients. Moisten with one pint of Spanish sauce, one-half breakfast cupful of mushroom liquor, one-half wineglassful of sherry, and the zest of a lemon, season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, and cook for twenty minutes. Then put the wings, legs and breasts into a separate saucepan and strain the sauce over, adding two minced truffles and six minced mushrooms. Cook for three minutes longer, dress them on a hot dish, and serve with croutons of fried bread for a garnish.
A classic salmis: the birds are roasted only part way, jointed, and finished in a sauce built from their own carcasses. The technique is sound, but the measurements and the sauce base need translating.
- The hinge: stop the first roast earlyThe eight to ten minutes in a brisk oven is deliberate. The joints are meant to come out well under done because they finish in the sauce for three minutes; roast them through at this stage and the breasts will be dry and stringy by service.
- Brisk ovenRead that as somewhere in the region of 425 to 450F. The point is colour and rendered fat in a short time, not cooking through.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole, the brown mother sauce of veal or beef stock thickened with brown roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato. A pint is a lot to make for one dish; a well-reduced brown game or veal stock, lightly thickened, does the same work.
- Mushroom liquorThe soaking or cooking liquid from mushrooms; at this date it might equally be the liquor from tinned button mushrooms. Strained liquid from soaked dried mushrooms is the closest modern equivalent.
- Old liquid measuresA wineglassful is about 2 fl oz, so half is roughly two tablespoons of sherry. A breakfast cupful runs 8 to 10 fl oz, so half is about half a cup of mushroom liquor.
- The birdsTwo dressed grouse are a modest quantity of meat, feeding two generously or four as part of a longer menu. Wild-shot native grouse is not sold commercially in the United States; farmed squab, partridge, or a pair of Cornish hens will carry the method, though none has the same iron-and-heather flavour.
- Singe, draw, trussAnything you buy today arrives drawn and largely clean. Singeing over a flame to remove pinfeathers is still worth doing on game birds, and trussing here matters only to keep the shape through a very brief roast.
- Do not skip the strainThe hashed carcasses, bones and all, are there purely to give the sauce its depth. Straining before the garnish goes in is what separates a salmis from a stew; press hard on the solids, then discard them.
- Truffles and croutonsTwo minced truffles is a flourish rather than a necessity; a spoonful of truffle trimmings or good truffle-scented oil off the heat approximates it. The recipe calls the fried bread a garnish; cut and fry it while the sauce cooks so it goes to table crisp.
A salmis is a French method dating to the classical repertoire: game roasted only briefly, jointed, and served in a sauce made from the pounded carcasses, the name generally traced to salmigondis, an old word for a ragout of mixed meats. It was a restaurant dish above all, because it demands two cooking stages, a made brown sauce already on hand, and a kitchen brigade to time them together. That Oscar Tschirky prints it in his 1896 cook book is a fair indication of what a New York hotel dining room expected of itself in the 1890s: Escoffier-era French technique applied to American market game. Grouse then reached city restaurants through a commercial wild-game trade that shipped barrels of birds by rail; that trade was curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900 and later federal bird protections, which is why the recipe now reads as a period document as much as a set of instructions.