No. 747

Montglas Salpicon

Salpicon a la Montglas

Made with four ounces of truffles, eight ounces of mushrooms, eight ounces of red beef tongue and eight ounces of chicken or game livers, all cut into small sticks; if needed for a white salpicon garnishing, then mix these with either a veloute (No. 415), or supreme sauce (No. 547), or allemande (No. 407), and if for brown then use espagnole (No. 414), or chicken glaze (No. 398), with essence of mushroom (No. 392).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component, not a finished dish: a bound dice-and-batons mixture meant to fill vol-au-vents, bouchées, croustades, timbales and rolled cutlets. Ranhofer assumes you already have the sauces and the cooked meats on hand, so most of the work is in the preparation he leaves unsaid.

What a salpicon isSmall uniform pieces of cooked ingredients bound with just enough sauce to hold them together. The binding should coat, not swamp: start with about half a cup of sauce per pound of solids and add only until the mixture mounds on a spoon.
"Small sticks"Ranhofer gives no dimensions; a short julienne, on the order of 1/8 inch square, is the usual reading. Cut everything to the same gauge; the point of the garnish is that four ingredients read as one texture.
Everything goes in cookedThe livers must be sautéed firm and cooled before cutting, the mushrooms cooked down in butter until they have given up their water, and the tongue already braised or bought cooked. Nothing in a salpicon finishes cooking in the sauce.
Red beef tongueThis is brine-cured tongue, pink from the curing salt, sold today as pickled or corned tongue at some butchers and delis. Plain braised fresh tongue works but loses the colour contrast against the black truffle that the garnish is built on.
TrufflesFour ounces of fresh black truffle is a serious sum now. Preserved truffle peelings or a smaller quantity of fresh truffle with a spoonful of its juice added to the sauce gives the aroma; supermarket truffle oil does not.
The saucesVelouté is a white stock sauce, suprême a velouté finished with cream, allemande a velouté bound with egg yolks. Espagnole is the brown mother sauce; chicken glaze is stock reduced to syrup, and mushroom essence is the strained reduced cooking liquor from mushrooms.
Chill before usingA warm salpicon runs. Spread it on a tray, cool it thoroughly, and it will hold its shape in a pastry case or inside a roulade. Some classical versions of Montglas are flavoured with Madeira, though Ranhofer does not call for it here.
YieldAbout 1 3/4 lb of solids (4 oz truffle plus 8 oz each of mushroom, tongue and liver), which once bound will fill a large vol-au-vent or a couple of dozen bouchées.

A Little History

Salpicon comes into French from Spanish, where salpicón means something chopped small and seasoned, and by the nineteenth century it had settled in professional French kitchens as the standard term for a bound dice used as filling or garnish. The Montglas version is one of the most durable of the named garnishes, and the name is generally traced to the Montglas family of the French nobility, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its signature is the four-part contrast of black truffle, pale mushroom, pink cured tongue and dark liver. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, files it here in a chapter of garnishings precisely because it was infrastructure: a mixture a large kitchen kept made up, ready to fill whatever pastry case the evening required.