No. 536

Salmis Sauce, with White Wine, with Champagne, with Red Wine and Truffles

Sauce Salmis, au vin Blanc au Champagne, au vin Rouge et aux Truffes

With White Wine.—Fry in butter without coloring the broken carcasses of six quails or three partridges; add to this half a bottleful of white wine and some broth, a garnished bunch of parsley and a few mushroom parings, then let boil slowly for one hour. Make an espagnole sauce (No. 414) with this fumet, and when properly reduced add to it the pounded meats and fragments previously cut off from the carcasses; pass all through a tammy, and then pour in some game glaze (No. 398) and butter, just when ready to serve.

With Champagne--Lay in a saucepan one pound of game carcasses, such as pheasants or grouse, after breaking them in pieces; to them add a quarter of a bottleful of champagne, two bay leaves, two minced shallots and one pint of broth; let all these simmer for half an hour before straining through a fine sieve, then reduce it to half with a pint of espagnole, adding another quarter bottleful of champagne and reduce it once more. Season with salt, black and red pepper, also grated nutmeg, and strain through a tammy, and just when ready to serve mix in two ounces of fresh butter.

With Red Wine and Truffles.—Break up the carcasses of six snipes, or plovers, or woodcocks; fry them in some butter with their intestines, suppressing the gizzards and pouches, two bay leaves, as much thyme and as much basil, some truffle peelings, one pint of espagnole (No. 414), and two gills of red wine. Boil, skim, and when prepared to serve squeeze in the juice of a lemon; strain the sauce through a tammy, (No. 159), and add to it one or two ounces of peeled and minced truffles.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Three variations on the same idea: a fumet drawn from game carcasses, married to espagnole and finished off the heat. Ranhofer assumes you have a stockpot line running, so the cross-references do most of the work.

The hinge: finish off the heatThe butter at the end (and the lemon in the red-wine version) goes in once the sauce is off the boil. Bring it back to a hard simmer after mounting and the emulsion breaks, leaving a greasy, separated sauce.
Espagnole and glazeNo. 414 is Ranhofer's brown sauce, built on a roux and long cooking; No. 398 is his glaze, stock reduced to a syrup. Good commercial demi-glace stands in for the first, and a hard-reduced game or brown chicken stock for the second.
FumetHere it means the game-and-wine infusion made from the carcasses, not a fish stock. Fry the bones pale without browning in the white-wine version — Ranhofer says "without coloring" for a reason, since the sauce is meant to taste of the bird rather than of roast.
MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of red wine is one cup. "A bottleful" is not defined here; if you read it as a modern wine bottle, half a bottleful is about 12 fl oz and a quarter about 6 fl oz.
TammyA tammy is a worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a conical strainer lined with damp muslin, gives the same result.
Red pepperIn Ranhofer this is cayenne, used in pinches. The champagne version wants enough to be felt behind the nutmeg, not tasted as heat.
The birdsQuail and partridge are farmed and easy to buy; pheasant, grouse, snipe and woodcock are seasonal game. Plover cannot legally be taken or sold in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — use another bird for that version.
The trailThe third sauce uses the intestines of snipe or woodcock, with gizzard and crop discarded, which is standard practice for these birds. They are cooked into the sauce and must simmer with it, not be added at the end.
YieldNo yield is given. The champagne and red-wine versions start from a pint of espagnole, so expect somewhere around a pint after reduction and straining — a sauce to spoon over rather than pool.

A Little History

Salmis is a dish before it is a sauce: game roasted until barely underdone, carved, and the pieces finished in a sauce built from the carcass, so that nothing of the bird is wasted. The word is generally traced to salmigondis, the old French term for a ragout of mixed meats, and by the nineteenth century a salmis was one of the set pieces of restaurant game cookery, sometimes finished at the table over a spirit lamp. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for some three decades and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives three versions here because the American game trade of the period was extravagant in a way that is now hard to picture: quail, snipe, plover, grouse and woodcock all came to market by the barrel, and a large kitchen accumulated carcasses daily. The recipe's structure — an infusion of bones and wine folded into an already-made espagnole — is the classic brigade economy, where each sauce is a variation on stock already standing on the range.