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Salmis of Pheasant
Cut off the flesh of a cold roast pheasant, remove the skin, and trim each piece nicely; put the bones and trimmings in a stewpan with two shallots, a clove of garlic, a laurel leaf, the grated rind of half a lemon, and a small piece of meat glaze, moisten with one pint of white wine and one tablespoonful of rich gravy. Stew the whole gently till the sauce has sufficiently reduced, then strain it through a fine hair-sieve. Return it to the saucepan, put in the pieces of pheasant meat, heat them through but do not boil the sauce again. Arrange the meat on a hot dish, squeeze the juice of an orange into the sauce, pour it round the meat, garnish with sippets of toast, or croutons of bread that have been fried brown in butter, and serve while very hot.
A salmis is a two-stage dish: the bird is roasted first, then its carcass builds the sauce for its own meat. Read it as a recipe for the second day, not the first.
- Start with a bird already roastedThe recipe calls for pheasant already roasted and gone cold; cold meat carves into clean, firm pieces where hot meat shreds. No yield is given in the text.
- Do not let the sauce boil once the meat is inThis is the hinge. Pheasant is lean and already fully cooked; a boil tightens the fibres and turns them dry and stringy. Bring the strained sauce to a bare quiver, slip in the meat, and hold it just long enough to heat through, three or four minutes.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande — brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate or a very reduced brown chicken stock stands in. It supplies the body that the wine alone will not.
- Laurel leafBay leaf. One dried leaf, or one fresh; the fresh sort is stronger, so use a small one.
- A pint of white wineOscar was publishing in New York, so the pint is most likely the US 16 fl oz. The recipe gives no finished volume, only the instruction to reduce until the sauce is sufficiently reduced and then strain. Use a dry white you would drink.
- Hair sieveA sieve bottomed with woven horsehair, once ordinary kitchen equipment for straining. A fine-mesh conical strainer does the same work; press the solids firmly to get everything out of the bones and shallot.
- Orange juice goes in off the heatSqueezed in at the end, it stays fresh and slightly sharp. Added earlier and cooked down it turns dull and faintly bitter.
- SippetsSmall pieces of toast; the recipe offers as an alternative croutons of bread fried brown in butter. Either way, make them last so they are still crisp when the plate goes out.
Salmis comes from the French kitchen, generally traced to salmigondis, an old word for a hash or medley, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into a fixed method for game: roast the bird, carve it, and make a concentrated sauce from the carcass and trimmings before returning the flesh to it. Escoffier and his contemporaries treated it as one of the standard game preparations, said to have sometimes been finished at the table over a spirit lamp for show. Oscar Tschirky's version is the domestic form of the same idea, and a salmis is what a professional kitchen does with a bird that has already been on the table once. The orange is the older touch \l runwildfowl runs back through French and English cookery well before the nineteenth century.