No. 2121

Salmis of Yellow—Leg Plovers a la Duclair

Salmis de Pluviers a Pattes Jaunes a la Duclair

Roast six yellow-leg plovers very rare either on the spit or in the oven; cut them up for a salmis retaining only the breasts, cut these in two through the center; pound the remainder of the meats with the same quantity of rice to obtain a puree; with the broken up carcass make a white wine fumet (No.397); dress the fillets in a circle and fill the center with the puree, lay on top of it some slices of truffle warmed up in half-glaze (No.400) with Madeira and fresh butter. Prepare some forcemeat as follows: Fry the intestines in butter with chopped shallots and chicken livers, season and rub through a sieve. Make some oblong crusts two and a half inches long, two wide and half an inch in thickness, slit them all around and fry to a fine color in clarified butter, remove the upper part and empty out the centers, then fill them with the prepared forcemeat, rounding it slightly on top and poach in a slack oven. Range these crusts around the dressed salmis and serve with a sauce-boat of espagnole sauce (No.414) reduced with the fumet and Madeira wine.

← No. 2120 Plovers Roasted a la Martel—Larded Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2122 Bustard Plovers a la Dumanoir →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a Delmonico's kitchen dish built on a bird that can no longer legally be bought, sold, or shot in the United States. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to attempt it.

The bird is protected"Yellow-leg plover" was market-gunners' usage for the lesser and greater yellowlegs, sandpipers rather than true plovers. Along with nearly all North American shorebirds they have been protected since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; taking, possessing, or selling them is a federal offense, and no legal commercial source exists.
Market shorebirds were the pointRanhofer worked from a wholesale game trade that supplied shorebirds to New York restaurants alongside golden plover and curlew, which appear elsewhere in the same chapter. That supply chain was closed deliberately, because it had collapsed the populations it fed. There is no equivalent modern purchase.
"Very rare" small game birdsRoasting small game birds barely through was common for snipe, woodcock and plover, and the trail was often prized rather than discarded. Wild birds carry Campylobacter and Salmonella, and "very rare" offers no thermal step at all; it is not a technique to carry forward.
The intestine forcemeatThe "trail" is fried briefly with shallot and chicken liver, sieved, then poached in a slack oven inside a crust. Neither the frying nor the poaching is specified or controlled enough to be a kill step for a raw wild-bird intestinal tract, which is precisely where pathogen load is highest.
A salmis, for the recordA salmis is a two-stage dish: the bird is roasted underdone, the prime cuts are set aside, and the carcass is broken up to build the sauce that finishes them. That structure survives in modern kitchens with duck and squab and is worth knowing even where this particular version cannot be cooked.
The cross-referencesNos. 397, 400 and 414 are Ranhofer's own white wine fumet, half-glaze and espagnole, each a separate preparation set out elsewhere in the book. The recipe as printed is a page of a system, not a standalone dish.
If you want the effectUse a current recipe for a salmis of farmed duck, squab or guinea fowl from a modern source, with modern handling and temperatures.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its game chapters are among the clearest surviving pictures of how much wild bird passed through a nineteenth-century American restaurant. Shorebirds moved through the New York game markets in quantity: plover, yellowlegs, dowitcher, curlew. The garnish name is generally traced to Duclair in Normandy, better known for its ducks, and Ranhofer used such regional tags loosely to distinguish one treatment from the next, much as he offers plovers a la Martel on the facing page. The dish itself is pure cuisine classique logic, extracting three preparations from six small birds: fillets for the plate, dark meat pounded with rice into a puree, carcasses into a fumet, and the trail into a forcemeat for fried croustades. Within a generation of publication the raw material was gone. Public alarm at the scale of market gunning produced the Lacey Act, then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and pages like this one became a historical document rather than a working recipe.