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Salmi of Duckling, Parisienne
Singe and neatly draw a fat duckling of about four to five pounds, keeping the heart and liver freed from the gall bag on a plate. Place in a small roasting pan a quarter sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, one sliced branch celery, one clove and a sprig of bay leaf; then place the duck on top. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; pour two tablespoons water in the pan, neatly spread a half tablespoon melted butter on top of the bird. Set in a brisk oven for twenty-five minutes, or until of a nice golden colour. Remove it from the oven. Then cut away the legs and breast from the duck, and cut each leg and the breast in three pieces. Place the pieces in a sautoire with two tablespoons sherry and a tablespoon brandy and keep warm. Place all the vegetables from the pan in a mortar, add the whole carcass, liver and heart, and sharply pound the whole to a pulp; transfer into a small saucepan with two gills of demi-glace and one gill tomato sauce; mix well and let boil for ten minutes. Strain this through a cheesecloth into the pan with the duck; lightly mix, let slowly boil for fifteen minutes on the range. Dress the pieces of duck on a hot dish, one overlapping another. Pour the sauce over and serve.
A classic salmis: the bird is roasted only part way, jointed, and the carcass sacrificed to build the sauce that finishes it. Read the whole method before starting, because the timing of the two cooking stages is the whole point.
- The hinge: the roast is deliberately incompleteTwenty-five minutes only colours the bird and sets the breast; the pieces finish in the sauce. Breast that has simmered fifteen minutes will be past rare, so slice it thin and add it toward the end if you want it pink. The legs are the problem — they will not be tender in fifteen minutes, and should be given 45-60 minutes in the sauce or, better, braised separately and reunited at the table.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills demi-glace is 1 cup; one gill tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. The finished sauce is roughly 1 1/2 cups before straining and reduction, which is about right for a duckling of this size.
- Brisk ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'brisk' is generally read as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. The aim at this stage is colour in twenty-five minutes rather than cooking the bird through.
- SautoireA wide, shallow, straight-sided pan — a modern sauté pan or a deep skillet. The duck pieces should sit in one layer so the sauce coats rather than submerges them.
- Demi-glaceIn this period, a brown sauce (espagnole) reduced with brown stock, and the recipe assumes a pot of it standing in the kitchen. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a can of beef gravy does not. Failing that, reduce 3 cups of dark chicken or veal stock to 1 cup.
- Pounding the carcassThe mortar step extracts marrow and roasting-pan flavour. A heavy cleaver and a few minutes of chopping does the same, or pulse the broken-up carcass and vegetables in a food processor before they go into the saucepan. Strain firmly through several layers of cheesecloth and press the solids to get everything out.
- Gall bag and heartThe gall bladder sits against the liver and must be cut away cleanly with a margin; a nicked one makes the whole sauce bitter. Modern ducks are usually sold with giblets bagged separately, in which case buy them if you can — they carry much of the sauce's depth.
- Bay and clove"A sprig of bay leaf" means one leaf. One clove is one whole clove, not a spoonful of ground; both are there to season the pan juices that become the sauce.
- YieldOne duckling jointed this way serves two generously, three at a stretch. Serve with something plain — potatoes, watercress — since the sauce is rich and slightly sweet from the tomato.
- Doneness checkDuck legs, once cut open, should reach 175F or above to be pleasant as well as safe; test the thickest piece before dressing the dish.
Salmis is a long-established French technique for game birds: the bird is part-roasted, carved, and the carcass pounded and simmered to make the sauce in which the pieces are finished. The name is generally traced to salmigondis, an old French word for a hash or medley, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a salmis was sometimes finished at table over a spirit lamp. The dish appears here because Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (this text following the 1911 printing) drew on the repertoire of the grand hotel and restaurant kitchens he had worked in — Delmonico's above all — where demi-glace and tomato sauce would have been standing ready. The recipe's assumption that a cook can reach for two gills of demi-glace without further comment is the clearest sign of the kind of kitchen it was written for.