No. 741

Salpicon Garnishing

Garniture Salpicon

A salpicon is composed of several meats cut in three-sixteenths to one-quarter inch dice, and combined with truffles and mushrooms trimmed exactly the same. It is used either with a brown espagnole sauce (No. 414), or if a white sauce is desired, with a veloute (No. 415), or an allemande (No. 407). The salpicon should be mixed with the sauces mentioned in each recipe.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a formula rather than a fixed recipe: Ranhofer is defining a component that recurs throughout The Epicurean, and the cook is expected to supply the meats and the sauce. A few things need translating.

The dice size is the whole pointThree-sixteenths to one-quarter inch is roughly 5-6 mm, and every element — meat, truffle, mushroom — must be cut to the same size. A salpicon that is unevenly cut reads as leftovers in sauce; uniformity is what makes it a garnish.
What the meats should beRanhofer leaves the choice to the dish being garnished, but the classical range is cooked poultry breast, sweetbreads, tongue, ham, veal or game. Everything goes in already cooked and cooled — a salpicon is assembled, not simmered.
The sauces he points toEspagnole is the brown veal-stock mother sauce; velouté is white stock thickened with blond roux; allemande is velouté finished with egg yolk and cream, and is not part of the modern five-sauce scheme. Any good reduced brown or white sauce of coating consistency will serve.
Proportion of sauceHe gives none. Use just enough to bind — roughly a quarter to a third the volume of the diced solids. A salpicon meant for filling vol-au-vents, croquettes or bouchées must be stiff enough to hold when cold, so chill it before shaping.
TrufflesTruffle was a costly import in 1890s New York, and much of what reached American kitchens arrived preserved or tinned rather than fresh; today a small amount of preserved truffle, or simply well-browned cremini and a few drops of truffle-infused oil off the heat, keeps the balance without the cost. The mushrooms were most likely cultivated buttons, fresh or canned, cooked and trimmed square.
ReheatingWarm the finished salpicon gently and briefly. The meats are already cooked, and holding them in hot sauce dries the poultry and turns sweetbreads grainy.
YieldNone is given because it depends on the dish. As a very rough guide, 2 cups of finished salpicon will fill a dozen or so small bouchées, or a single medium vol-au-vent case.

A Little History

Salpicon comes into French from Spanish, where it names a dish of chopped meat, and by the nineteenth century French professional kitchens had narrowed it to precisely this: cooked ingredients cut to a regular small dice and bound with sauce. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years, placed it in his chapter of garnishings rather than among the dishes because it functions as a building block — cross-referenced by number from dozens of entries elsewhere in The Epicurean (1894), the way a modern professional book cross-references a stock or a base. The cross-references to Espagnole, velouté and allemande show the system Ranhofer worked in: a kitchen brigade kept mother sauces standing, and a garnish like this was a matter of combining components already on hand. Allemande's disappearance from the standard list of mother sauces came later, with Escoffier's reorganisation, which is one reason the sauce name looks unfamiliar now.