No. 750

Regence Salpicon

Salpicon a la Regence

For Lean.—Use four ounces of truffles cut in three sixteenth inch squares, six ounces of mushrooms cut the same, six ounces of crawfish tails likewise cut in three-sixteenth inch pieces, four ounces of milt, and four ounces of very small bead-shaped fish quenelles, all to be combined with a lean regence sauce (No. 532).

For Fat.—Five ounces of braised sweetbreads, five ounces of chicken livers and five ounces of mushrooms, all these to be cut in three-sixteenth inch squares, five ounces of small bead-shaped chicken quenelles (No. 154), and four ounces of truffles cut the same as the other ingredients; to be used with a fat regence sauce (No. 532).

← No. 749 Previllot Salpicon Garnishings No. 751 Royal Salpicon →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component recipe rather than a finished dish: a salpicon is a mixture of small even dice bound with sauce, here in two versions to suit fast days and meat days. Ranhofer expects you to have the numbered sauces and quenelles already in hand.

Lean and fat"For Lean" is maigre, the fish-and-vegetable version served on days when the Church forbade meat; "For Fat" is gras, built on sweetbreads and poultry. They are alternatives, not stages of one recipe.
Three-sixteenths of an inchAbout 5 mm. The uniformity is the whole point of a salpicon: every element should read as the same cube so the filling cuts cleanly and no single ingredient dominates a spoonful.
MiltSoft roe, the sperm sacs of male fish, usually herring, carp or shad. It is poached and firmed before dicing. Rarely stocked outside specialist fishmongers and some Japanese and Eastern European shops; more diced poached fish or extra crawfish will stand in.
Bead-shaped quenellesForcemeat piped or rolled into pea-sized balls and poached gently in barely trembling liquid, never a rolling boil, or they break up. The fish version for the lean salpicon, the chicken forcemeat of No. 154 for the fat.
Régence sauceRégence sauce -- Ranhofer's No. 532, which he gives in both lean and fat forms, as the recipe requires: a velouté-type sauce finished with truffle essence and reduced wine, made on fish stock for the lean version. Any good rich velouté finished with truffle and wine gives a similar effect.
Bind it late and lightlyAdd only enough hot sauce to coat and hold the dice. Too much sauce and the salpicon slumps out of whatever it is filling; too much stirring and the quenelles and sweetbreads shred.
Crawfish tails and sweetbreadsBoth are to be cooked before dicing: the recipe specifies braised sweetbreads, and the tails would be poached and peeled. Neither needs further cooking in the sauce.
Yield and useEach version comes to twenty-four ounces of solids, a pound and a half, before the sauce goes in; it is intended as a filling or garnish for the patties, timbales, croustades and stuffed poultry found elsewhere in the volume.

A Little History

The name points to the Régence, the years 1715 to 1723 when Philippe d'Orléans governed France for the child Louis XV, a period nineteenth-century chefs treated as shorthand for aristocratic luxury; in kitchen usage à la Régence came to mean a garnish loaded with truffles, quenelles and sweetbreads, bound in a pale wine-and-truffle sauce. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, organised the book so that a composite like this one is a numbered part rather than a dish: the salpicon feeds into patties, timbales, croustades and stuffed poultry elsewhere in the volume. That it comes in lean and fat versions is a survival of the ecclesiastical calendar in professional cooking, where a restaurant of that class was expected to serve Lent and Fridays without any visible drop in extravagance. The word salpicon itself is generally traced to Spanish, where it describes a chopped and dressed mixture, though French cookery had narrowed it to precise dice bound with sauce well before Ranhofer's day.