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June 14
Menu: Roasted Little Neck Clams; Salmi of Lamb; Fried New Potatoes; Boiled Bermuda Onions; Individual Strawberry Pies; Coffee Salmi of Lamb-Cut cold roast lamb in thin slices. Cook 5 minutes 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped onion. Add lamb, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with 1 cup cold lamb gravy seasoned with Worcestershire sauce. Cook until thoroughly heated. Arrange slices overlapping one another lengthwise of platter, pour around sauce, and garnish with toast points. A few stoned olives and mushrooms improve this sauce.
A leftovers dish from a day's menu in the Crisco book — the "Coffee" in the title is the tail end of the printed dinner, not part of the recipe. The whole thing hinges on reheating already-cooked lamb without cooking it a second time.
- The hinge: heat, do not simmerThe lamb is already roasted. Bring the gravy to a bare quiver and let the slices sit in it three or four minutes until hot through; a real simmer will squeeze them dry and grey. Carve the slices thin and even so they heat at the same rate.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so every fat is Crisco. Two tablespoons of any neutral fat works — butter or oil is better here, since a little browning in the pan helps the sauce.
- "Cold lamb gravy"This assumes yesterday's roast produced a cup of thickened pan gravy, jellied in the larder. Without it, use a cup of well-reduced lamb or beef stock thickened with a scant tablespoon of flour worked into the onion and fat before the liquid goes in.
- WorcestershireNo quantity given. A teaspoon into a cup of gravy is about right; it is there for depth and salt, and it will fight the seasoning if you go past two.
- Stoned olives"Stoned" means pitted. Green olives in brine, halved, added at the end so they warm rather than cook. Sliced mushrooms should be sauteed separately in a hot pan and stirred in — dropped raw into gravy they weep and thin it.
- Toast pointsCrustless bread toasted and cut corner to corner. They go on at the last second; laid in the sauce ahead of time they turn to paste.
- Reheating leftoversRoast lamb that has been refrigerated should come up to steaming hot all the way through, not merely warm.
- YieldNo yield is given. A cup of gravy and the meat off a modest roast would serve perhaps three or four as a lunch or supper dish.
A salmi (from the French salmis) was originally a restaurant preparation of roasted game birds — partridge, woodcock — jointed while still warm and finished in a rich sauce built from the carcass. By the late nineteenth century American and English household books seem to have borrowed the name for any sliced cooked meat reheated in a good brown sauce, which is exactly what this is: a way of making Monday's lamb look like a dish rather than a remainder. It turns up in the sort of cookery book that paired recipes with a dated calendar of dinners so a housekeeper could plan a full year and, not incidentally, buy shortening all through it. The dated menus also show how a roast was expected to work in a household: served hot on one day, sliced cold or re-dressed with the saved gravy on the next, with nothing thrown out.