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Antelope Steaks, Salmi Sauce
Procure six five-ounce steaks from a stale leg of antelope, neatly flatten and season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon black pepper. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in sautoir, add steaks one beside another and briskly cook them for four minutes on each side, dress on a hot dish, pour the Salmi sauce over and serve.
A short, confident piece of game cookery that assumes you have a butchered antelope hanging somewhere and a pot of salmi sauce already made. Both assumptions need work.
- "Stale" means hung, not spoiled"Stale" here almost certainly means hung rather than spoiled -- the leg left in a cool larder long enough for the muscle to relax and the flavour to deepen. Any properly dry-aged game leg answers the description; meat that smells sour or is tacky does not.
- Sourcing the meatWild pronghorn cannot legally be sold in the United States, so the antelope here comes from a hunter or not at all. Farmed nilgai antelope, axis venison or red deer leg are the practical substitutes and behave the same way in the pan.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow, not a saucepan. Use the heaviest skillet you own and get it properly hot before the butter goes in.
- Butter alone will burnA tablespoon of butter over the heat needed to sear six steaks will blacken before the last one is in. Add a neutral oil to raise the smoke point, or sear in oil and finish with butter.
- Four minutes a side is too longThese steaks are cut from the leg, which on any antelope is very lean — near-zero intramuscular fat. Eight minutes total will take a five-ounce steak well past medium and it will be dry and livery. Sear hard and pull at 130–135°F internal, which for a flattened steak is closer to two minutes a side.
- Don't crowd the pan"One beside another" is the instruction, but six steaks in one sautoir will steam rather than brown. Work in two batches and keep the first warm while the second cooks.
- The salmi sauceThe recipe assumes you will turn to the author's own salmi sauce elsewhere in the book. A salmi sauce is broadly a dark game sauce finished with wine; whatever form his takes, it is a project in its own right and should be made before the steaks go anywhere near heat.
- YieldSix steaks at five ounces each — six servings, or four generous ones.
Salmi (from the French salmis, itself generally traced to the old salmigondis, a ragout of mixed meats) is the classic French treatment for feathered and furred game: the flesh cooked briefly and served under a dark sauce built from the carcass and trimmings, sharpened with wine. Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, was writing for a period when American hotel and club kitchens still ran on wild game — antelope, venison, canvasback, prairie chicken — supplied by market hunters and shipped in by rail. Within a generation that trade was gone: the Lacey Act of 1900 and the state game laws that followed closed the commercial sale of most wild meat, which is why a recipe that once assumed a leg of antelope in the larder now reads as a period document as much as a set of instructions.