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Salpicon Financiere
Take either the leg or the breast of a roasted chicken. Cut it into dice, and put them in a saucepan with one-half ounce of good butter, adding four mushrooms, one truffle, one-half ounce of cooked smoked beef tongue all cut in dice, and a dozen small godiveau quenelles; thicken with one-half pint of Madeira sauce, and cook for five minutes. It will then be ready for use as a garnish.
Salpicon, Hunter's Style Cut the breast of a fine, well-cooked partridge into dice, and put them into a saucepan on a hot range, with one-half ounce of butter, one-half wineglassful of good sherry, three blanched chicken livers, one truffle, four mushrooms, and one-half ounce of cooked, smoked beef tongue, all cut up into dice. Thicken with one-half pint of hot salmis sauce, and allow all to cook for five minutes. It may then be used for garnishing.
Two garnishes rather than dishes in their own right: a salpicon is simply cooked meats and aromatics cut to a uniform dice and bound with a strong sauce, meant to fill a vol-au-vent, timbale, croustade or bouchée. The page runs the two recipes together, and the second one begins at "Salpicon, Hunter's Style."
- The hinge: cut everything the same sizeA salpicon is defined by its dice. Aim for a scant quarter-inch on every component so no single element dominates a spoonful, and cut before the sauce goes in, not after.
- MeasuresA half pint here is 8 fl oz of sauce, which is generous for the quantity of solids and gives a loose, spoonable filling. The book does not define a wineglassful; period American usage generally reckons it at about 2 fl oz, though larger readings were also current. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Godiveau quenellesGodiveau is a veal forcemeat bound with suet and egg, piped or shaped into small dumplings and poached in barely simmering salted water until they float. Poach them separately and add them at the end; they are delicate and will break up if stirred hard. Small poached chicken mousseline dumplings are a reasonable stand-in.
- The two saucesMadeira sauce is a reduced brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira. Salmis sauce is browner and gamier, built from the pounded carcass and trimmings of the roast game bird with red wine and stock. Neither is a bottled product; both need to be made or replaced with a well-reduced demi-glace fortified with the appropriate wine.
- TruffleOne truffle in a New York kitchen of this period would have been a black truffle, most often preserved rather than fresh. Fresh truffle is a luxury purchase; a teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle or truffle peelings does the same visual work. Truffle oil does not, and will read as artificial against the Madeira.
- Smoked beef tongueCooked, cold, peeled smoked tongue was a familiar item in kitchens of this kind and provided the salty, faintly pink note. Deli-cut tongue works; failing that, a small dice of good ham or thick-cut bacon cooked through is closer in effect than nothing.
- Chicken livers"Blanched" here means dropped briefly into boiling water or stock to firm them so they will dice cleanly. They then cook through in the five minutes with the sauce, and should not be pushed further or they turn grainy.
- PartridgePartridge can be had from game dealers, wild in season and farmed otherwise, but the breast of a roast pheasant, guinea fowl or squab substitutes without changing the character of the dish. Use the bones for the salmis sauce.
- Timing and yieldFive minutes is only to heat through and marry the sauce; longer will toughen the chicken and collapse the quenelles. Each recipe makes enough to fill roughly four to six individual pastry cases, or to garnish a platter for four.
Salpicon comes into French cookery from the Spanish salpicón, a dish of chopped seasoned meat, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed in professional French kitchens to mean exactly this: a fine, even dice of cooked meats and garnishes bound with a sauce and used as a filling. Carême and later Escoffier codified dozens of named versions, and the names are a map of the classical repertoire rather than of any region. "Financière" is generally traced to the wealth of its components -- truffle, tongue, quenelles, Madeira; "chasseur" or hunter's style signals game and the salmis treatment, where a roast bird's carcass is pounded and worked back into its own sauce. That the compilation includes both, with godiveau quenelles taken for granted, says a good deal about what a hotel cook in the 1890s was expected to assemble from a larder already stocked with demi-glace, poached forcemeat and tinned truffles.