No. 2061

Salmis of Mallard Ducks with Madeira

Salmis de Canards Sauvages, Mallard au Madere

Cut two roasted wild ducks into six pieces; remove the skin and part of the bones, then divide the breasts and legs, suppressing the feet, and range them in a sautoir keeping it covered. Chop up the carcass, bones, and parings; fry a mirepoix (No. 419), and minced shallots with aromatic herbs, add to this the chopped carcasses and moisten with two or three gills of red wine previously boiled in a copper pan, and reduce it to three-quarters; again moisten to their height with stock (No. 194a) and continue to cook for twenty minutes; strain this through a tammy, remove the fat and return it to the fire and reduce, thickening with half-glaze sauce (No. 413), and finishing with two spoonfuls of Madeira wine. As soon as it is completed, strain it over the pieces of duck, and heat in a bain-marie for a quarter of an hour. Dress the pieces on a dish, cover over with a part of the sauce and serve the remainder separately; surround with thin round crusts masked on one side with baked liver forcemeat (No. 81), and serve.

← No. 2060 Mallard Ducks with Celery half-Glaze-Roasted Wild Duck & Waterfowl No. 2062 Redhead Ducks a la Bareda →

For the Modern Kitchen

A salmis is a two-stage dish: the birds are roasted rare, then carved and finished in a sauce built from their own carcasses. Ranhofer's cross-references send you to four other numbered recipes, so the shopping list is longer than it looks.

The hinge: the ducks are already cookedRoast the mallards rare — breast around 125-130F — because the pieces spend a further fifteen minutes in the finished sauce. Wild duck breast is lean and dark and turns liver-dry the moment it passes medium.
Gills and wineA gill is half a cup, so two or three gills is 1 to 1.5 cups of red wine, reduced to about three-quarters of its volume as the text directs. Ignore the copper pan; use stainless or enamel, since acidic wine sitting in unlined copper picks up metal.
The cross-referenced componentsNo. 419 is Ranhofer's mirepoix (an aromatic vegetable base, typically with a little ham or bacon), No. 194a is one of his stocks, presumably a brown one, and No. 413 is half-glaze — demi-glace. Good commercial demi-glace or a heavily reduced brown stock will stand in; without it the sauce has no body, as there is no flour or butter thickening anywhere in the method.
TammyA tammy was a woollen straining cloth wrung between two people. A fine chinois pressed hard, then a pass through muslin, gets you the same clarity.
Bain-marie, not a simmerThe covered sautoir goes over hot water so the sauce stays near 160-175F. Direct heat will boil the sauce, break the reduction and overcook the meat.
The garnishNo. 81 is a baked (gratin) liver forcemeat; a coarse liver pate, or the birds' own livers mashed with butter, shallot and a little of the reduction, spread on the rounds of crust, gives the same effect.
ShotShot birds carry pellets. Run a finger over each piece before it goes into the sautoir, and check the chopped carcass before it hits the stock — a pellet in the sauce is unpleasant and, if it is lead, worse than unpleasant.
YieldTwo mallards cut into six pieces each serves four as a main course, or six if the salmis follows a substantial first course, as it would have at Delmonico's.

A Little History

Salmis is generally traced to salmigondis, the old French word for a hotchpotch of assorted meats, and by the eighteenth century it had narrowed to mean exactly this treatment: game birds roasted underdone, jointed at table or in the kitchen, and finished in a sauce made from their own broken-up carcasses. It was a restaurant showpiece precisely because it required two cooking stages and a stockpot standing ready. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for more than thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 with an entire section on wild duck — mallard, canvasback, redhead, teal — reflecting an American market in which wild waterfowl was still sold commercially by the barrel. Market hunting on that scale ended with federal migratory bird protection in the following decades, which is why a modern cook needs a hunter, a game dealer or a farmed substitute to make a dish that Ranhofer could order by the crate.