No. 742

Salpicon Garnishing, Columbian

Garniture Salpicon, Colombienne

Is composed of sixteen ounces of mushrooms, four ounces of roast game fillets, six ounces of lambs' fries. and if for fat, a fat financiere sauce (No. 464), and if required for lean, use twelve blanched and well drained oysters cut in pieces and sauted in butter, with six ounces of mushrooms, six ounces of salmon sauted in butter, and with these use a lean financiere sauce.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component, not a finished dish: a salpicon is a fine dice of cooked ingredients bound with a reduced sauce, spooned into vol-au-vents and timbales or used to fill garnishes for a large roast. Ranhofer gives weights and assumes you already have the sauce made.

Cut size is the whole pointEverything should be diced to a uniform quarter-inch or smaller so the mixture holds together on a spoon and reads as one texture. Ingredients are cooked first, then cut, then bound with just enough sauce to coat.
Fat and leanThe two versions are for meat days and fast days in the Catholic calendar: gras with game and lambs' fries, maigre with oysters and salmon. Financière sauce likewise exists in a meat-stock and a fish-stock version, and Ranhofer expects you to match them.
Financière sauceNo. 464 is a Madeira-and-truffle sauce, made on a meat base for the fat version and a lean one for fish days; check that recipe for the details. Use only enough to bind and coat, not enough to make a stew.
Lambs' friesIn American usage of this period generally testicles, though elsewhere 'lamb's fry' means liver and pluck. They need to be peeled of the tough membrane, soaked, blanched, then sliced and sautéed before dicing. Sweetbreads are sometimes used as a modern substitute and behave similarly in a salpicon.
Roast game filletsTrim from an already-roasted bird or saddle, which suggests a use for roast meat already cooked. Pheasant, partridge, venison loin or duck breast all work; cook it no further than medium or it will be dry once diced.
The oysters"Blanched" here means barely firmed in their own liquor, a matter of seconds, then drained hard and cut. If they simmer they turn rubbery and will weep liquid into the sauce.
MushroomsThe sixteen ounces is probably raw weight, and mushrooms lose a good deal of water in cooking. Sauté in butter over high heat until the water has gone, or the salpicon will be loose.
QuantityThe fat version comes to roughly a pound and a half of bound mixture — enough to fill twelve to sixteen small pastry cases, or to garnish a single large centrepiece in the style the book assumes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, with a break in his tenure, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire, garnishes included, in the French classical order. The salpicon section runs to a series of numbered variations because the form was infinitely extensible: any cooked protein, cut small and bound in a sauce, could be given a name and a place on a menu. The doubling into fat and lean versions is older and more practical — a restaurant serving a Catholic clientele needed a fish-stock answer to every meat-stock preparation, and Ranhofer supplies them throughout as a matter of course.