Roast six woodcocks very rare; cut them in four, lift off all the skin and place the birds in an alcohol chafing dish; season with salt, pepper, add a little blanched shallot, three gills of wine, the juice of a lemon, a little fresh bread raspings and an ounce and a half of butter; simmer for a few moments, then serve.
A salmis is a two-stage dish: the birds are roasted underdone, then finished in a sauce at the table. Ranhofer assumes a chafing dish in the dining room and a cook who already knows how a woodcock should be handled.
Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his working record of it — hence the numbered entries and the string of near-identical woodcock salmis, each distinguished only by a name. Salmis is a French term generally traced to salmigondis, an old word for a hash or medley, and it describes a specific restaurant technique rather than a single dish: game roasted deliberately underdone, carved, and reheated briefly in a wine sauce, often at the table. Woodcock and snipe were prized above almost all other birds in nineteenth-century American dining rooms, and market game was shipped and sold commercially until market hunting was curtailed in the early twentieth century; the section this recipe sits in, crowded with reedbirds, ortolans and plover, reads now as an inventory of what a wealthy New Yorker could order for dinner before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed the trade.