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Salpicon with Madeira
Place one-half ounce of butter in a saucepan, adding one-half wineglassful of sherry, a blanched throat of sweetbread, cut into dice, four mushrooms, one truffle, and one ounce of cooked smoked beef tongue, all cut the same as the sweetbread. Let this cook for five minutes, then add one-half pint of Madeira sauce, and let it cook again for five minutes. It will then be ready for garnishing.
A component recipe rather than a dish: Oscar's kitchen kept salpicon on hand to fill vol-au-vents, bouchées, timbales and croustades, and to garnish sweetbread or chicken entrées. Two things carry it — the Madeira sauce and a uniform dice.
- The sauce is the recipeMadeira sauce here means a brown sauce: reduced demi-glace or espagnole finished with Madeira, not wine thickened with flour. A half pint is one cup. If you are working from stock, reduce a good veal or beef stock to a glossy, lightly bodied sauce and add the Madeira off the boil so its aroma survives.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, so a half wineglassful is 2 tablespoons. Note that the sherry in the pan and the Madeira in the sauce are two different additions despite the title.
- Throat sweetbreadThe elongated thymus of the neck, as opposed to the rounder "heart" or belly sweetbread. It is leaner and firmer, and rarely sold separately now; ask a butcher for veal sweetbreads and expect the pair. Soak in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch, press cool under a weight, then peel the membrane before dicing — undertrimmed sweetbread turns gluey.
- Cook it through"Blanched" in the original most likely assumes the usual preparation of blanching and then poaching until tender. Ten minutes in sauce will not tenderise raw offal, so the sweetbread is best fully cooked and cooled before it is cut.
- Uniform diceThe recipe says only that everything is cut the same as the sweetbread; by convention a salpicon is a small dice, roughly a quarter-inch. This is the whole point of a salpicon; ragged pieces read as leftovers rather than a garnish.
- TruffleThe recipe does not say which truffle; a black winter truffle is the likely intention. Truffles were an unremarkable larder item in a grand hotel and are a luxury now. A teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle or truffle peelings gives a similar dark speckle; truffle oil does not, and will overpower the Madeira.
- Smoked beef tongueCured, cooked tongue, sold sliced at delicatessens. A firm smoked ham or good cooked pastrami trimmed lean substitutes without wrecking the balance, though the tongue is what gives the mixture its faintly pink flecks.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of filling — enough for six to eight small pastry cases, or to garnish four plated portions. Keep it thick; a loose salpicon soaks pastry through.
Salpicon comes into French cookery from Spanish, where it means a hash or something chopped fine, and by the nineteenth century it had a settled technical meaning in professional kitchens: small even dice of cooked meat, offal, mushroom and truffle bound with a sauce, held ready to fill something. Carême and later Escoffier codified dozens of them, distinguished by their bindings — velouté for white salpicons, demi-glace and Madeira for brown. Oscar Tschirky's book records the working stock-in-trade of the Waldorf's kitchen brigade around 1896, which is why entries like this one read as instructions to a cook rather than to a housekeeper: no serving suggestion is offered because any cook in that kitchen already knew what it was going into. The combination of sweetbread, truffle and tongue in a Madeira binding was one of the common rich brown salpicon formulas of the era.