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Salmis of Pigeons
Cut some cold cooked pigeons into nice pieces, season them on both sides with salt and pepper, and flour them well; put them in a stewpan with a little cold water, one ounce of butter, a few drops of mushroom catsup, and boil over a slow fire for a few minutes. When done turn the salmis onto a hot dish, garnish it with sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A salmis is a reheating dish: birds already roasted are jointed and finished in a quick pan sauce. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the pigeons are cooked, and the flour dredge is what thickens the sauce, so it needs to go on generously.
- The hinge: gentle heat, short time"Boil over a slow fire" means a bare simmer, and "a few minutes" means just long enough to heat the meat through and let the flour thicken the liquid, roughly four or five minutes. Pigeon breast that has already been roasted turns dry and livery if it is held at a rolling boil.
- Pigeon and squabWild pigeon is rarely found in American markets; farmed squab is the usual substitute and is generally what butchers and game suppliers mean by pigeon today. One squab is a generous single portion, so this quantity of butter and water suits about two birds; scale the sauce up if you use more.
- Cold cooked pigeonsThe recipe assumes leftovers from a roast. Starting from scratch, roast the birds in a hot oven until the breast is still pink, cool them completely, then joint into legs and breast halves off the bone. Cold meat is far easier to cut cleanly than warm.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty liquid of salted mushrooms and spices, once sold everywhere and now rare. Mushroom ketchup is still bottled in Britain and worth seeking out; failing that, a teaspoon of good soy sauce or a spoonful of concentrated mushroom stock gives a comparable savory depth. It is a seasoning, not a sauce base, so a few drops really is the measure.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. "A little cold water" is about half a cup for two birds, enough to come partway up the meat rather than cover it.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, either toasted dry or fried in butter until crisp, set around the rim of the dish. They are there to soak up the sauce and should be made at the last moment so they stay brittle.
- What is missingMany nineteenth-century salmis recipes use the carcasses and a glass of red wine or Madeira to build the sauce. This version is stripped down for speed. A splash of red wine reduced in the pan before the water goes in brings it closer to the classical dish.
- YieldThe recipe says only "some" pigeons; two birds would serve two as a main course or four as a small course.
Salmis is generally taken as a shortening of the older French salmigondis, a ragout of mixed meats, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed to mean a dish of roasted game birds jointed and finished in a sauce. It suited restaurant work, since birds could be roasted in advance and finished to order in minutes. Pigeon was ordinary food in Oscar Tschirky's New York, sold cheaply in the markets and appearing on hotel menus. Mushroom catsup places the recipe in its period; before commercial meat extracts and bottled stock bases, a cook reaching for savory depth reached for a bottle of salted mushroom liquor, which sat on kitchen shelves alongside walnut catsup and anchovy essence.