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Salpicon of Shrimps
Put one pint of bechamel sauce into a saucepan with four mushrooms, one truffle and the meat from a dozen or more large shrimps, all chopped up fine. Thicken well, and let it cook for five minutes; then serve.
A classic French filling rather than a dish in itself: chopped shrimp bound in a thick white sauce, meant to be spooned into pastry. The whole thing hangs on getting the sauce stiff enough to hold a shape.
- "Thicken well" is the hingeA pint of bechamel to a dozen shrimp gives a loose sauce that will run out of any pastry shell. Reduce it over low heat, stirring, until it mounds on the spoon and pulls away from the pan; a salpicon should be barely pourable.
- A pintTwo cups of bechamel, made in the usual way with butter, flour and milk. Season it properly before the shrimp go in — salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne.
- Shrimp timingThe phrase "the meat from a dozen or more large shrimps" suggests shrimp already boiled and picked, in which case fold them into the reduced sauce off the heat rather than simmering them, or they turn to rubber. Five minutes' cooking suits shrimp that are raw and chopped very fine.
- TruffleOne fresh black truffle is not a realistic purchase for most cooks. A small jar of truffle peelings, chopped, gets closer to the original than truffle oil, which reads as perfume against the shrimp.
- MushroomsCook the chopped mushrooms in a little butter until their water has gone before adding them, otherwise they release liquid into the sauce and undo the reduction.
- Cut size"Chopped up fine" means a small, even dice rather than a paste. The point of a salpicon is that each spoonful holds distinct pieces.
- Yield and servingRoughly three cups of filling once the solids are in, enough for a dozen or so small vol-au-vent or puff pastry shells, or several croustades as a first course. Serve hot, and fill the pastry at the last moment so it stays crisp.
Salpicon comes to French cooking from Spanish — salpicar, to sprinkle or spatter — and by the nineteenth century it meant any mixture of small even cuts of meat, fish, game or vegetable bound with a sauce and used as a stuffing or a filling for pastry. Nineteenth-century French cookery books list many such mixtures, and the form suited large kitchens because a salpicon could be made in quantity in advance and dropped into bouchees, croustades or timbales to order. That is plausibly the role it plays here: the recipe assumes a well-stocked professional pantry, where truffle, mushroom and a ready bechamel were to hand, and can therefore be written in three lines.