Have eight ounces of fresh raw mushrooms, twelve ounces of egg-plant and one ounce of onions all cut into small squares; place three ounces of butter in a saucepan to heat, then lay in the onions to fry lightly first, add the egg-plant and later the mushrooms with a mite of garlic. Moisten with a half-glaze sauce (No. 413) and white wine, despumate, reduce and lastly add some chopped parsley.
A diced vegetable ragout meant to fill vol-au-vents, croustades or timbales, or to be spooned beside a roast. The whole thing takes twenty minutes once the demi-glace is on hand.
Salpicon comes from the Spanish salpicón, a dish of meat chopped small, and by the nineteenth century French kitchens had turned it into a technical term: anything cut in neat dice and bound with a sauce, ready to fill a bouchée, a croustade or an omelet. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, devoted a run of numbered entries in The Epicurean (1894) to them — Palermitaine before this one, Régence after — precisely because a well-stocked kitchen needed a shelf of interchangeable fillings that could be made from whatever the larder held. The name Previllot may honor a patron or a colleague; Ranhofer supplies no explanation, and no identification has been documented. What the combination does tell you is the season and the sensibility: eggplant with mushroom, garlic and parsley in a brown sauce is southern French cooking in miniature, dressed up in the diced, sauced, skimmed idiom that a Fifth Avenue restaurant expected of everything that left its range.