No. 745

Hunter's Salpicon

Salpicon au Chasseur

Is composed of roasted game breasts cut in three-sixteenth inch dice pieces, truffles cut the same, as well as mushrooms and tongue, and chicken livers cut up in one-quarter inch pieces, mixed with a Hunter's sauce (No. 480).

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A salpicon is a bound dice — cooked ingredients cut small and held together with a thick sauce, then used to fill vol-au-vents, croustades, timbales or to garnish a roast. Ranhofer gives proportions to the cook's judgment, so the working rule is what matters most: the sauce should coat, not swamp.

The hinge: sauce quantityAdd the hot sauce a spoonful at a time until the dice just cling together and a spoonful holds its shape. Ranhofer gives no proportion; use only as much as binds. Too much and the filling runs out of any case you put it in.
What Hunter's sauce isNo. 480 is Ranhofer's Hunter's sauce (sauce chasseur), in the classical manner a brown sauce worked with shallots, white wine and chopped mushrooms. A good reduced brown sauce or a well-reduced veal stock thickened lightly will stand in; it needs body enough to bind cold.
Dice sizeThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm — a small, even dice, cut so the mixture spoons cleanly. The chicken livers are specified slightly larger, at a quarter inch (about 6 mm).
Roasted game breastsPheasant, partridge, grouse or duck breast, cooked and cooled before dicing. Cold meat cuts to a clean cube; warm meat tears.
TongueNineteenth-century kitchens meant cured, cooked beef tongue, whether brined in-house or bought in. Delicatessen tongue is the direct equivalent; a firm cooked ham cut the same size will substitute.
TrufflesTruffles appear routinely through The Epicurean as a garnish. A small quantity of fresh black truffle, or preserved truffle with its juices added to the sauce, gives the intended effect; more mushroom is the honest alternative rather than truffle oil.
Chicken liversTrim the green-tinged bile spots and connective tissue, sauté in butter until cooked through and firm, then cool and dice. Badly overcooked livers turn granular and grey in the mixture.
ServingUse warm, not hot: fill bouchées or croustades just before they go to table, or spoon around a roast bird. Made ahead, it can be refrigerated and reheated gently, but the sauce will need loosening with a little stock.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its garnish section reads like an inventory of the classical French repertoire transplanted to Manhattan. Salpicon comes from the Spanish for a chopped, seasoned mixture, and by the nineteenth century it had settled in French professional cooking as the standard way to turn odds and ends of cooked meat, game and trimmings into a filling of uniform dice bound with a sauce — the numbered cross-reference to No. 480 is the whole point of a book like this, where every dish is assembled from parts defined elsewhere. The chasseur or hunter's treatment, mushrooms and shallots in white wine, is generally traced to the same logic that gives the dish its name: the sauce that goes with what the hunt brings home. That truffles and cured tongue appear here as unremarkable staples says a good deal about the era's restaurant larder, and about a clientele that expected game on the menu through the autumn and winter.