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Salmi of Duck or Game

A sauce made from duck or game bones, trimmings, and aromatics, simmered with wine and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Salmi of Duck or Game

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. In a saucepan, combine the bruised bones, skin, trimmings, gravy, carrot, onion, salt, pepper, parsley, clove, mace, bay leaf, thyme, and butter.

  2. Fry the mixture in butter until light brown.

  3. Add the broth or water, wine, and sugar; cover and stew until reduced by half.

  4. If you don't have brown sauce ready, prepare ½ cup of it now.

  5. Add the brown sauce to the saucepan and stew for another 30 minutes.

  6. Strain the sauce, taste for seasoning, and pour it over the meat in another saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat the meat gently until just boiling, but do not boil.

  2. Dish the bird and boil the sauce rapidly to reduce it, skimming off any fat.

  3. When the sauce is thick enough, pour it over the meat and serve with fried snippets and olives or red currant jelly.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Duck or game bird
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the sauce is built around.
Butter
Fat for frying the aromatics, adding richness and helping them brown.
Brown sauce
Adds body and deep savoury flavour to the sauce.
Red or white wine
Adds acidity and aroma, sharpening the flavour of the reduced sauce.
Onion
Softens and browns in butter, adding sweetness and savoury depth.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce rapidly to reduce it. Rapid boiling evaporates water and concentrates flavour and body, so the sauce thickens. Skimming removes fat that would make it greasy. Boiling the meat itself must be avoided, since it toughens the flesh.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, onion, pepper, parsley, clove, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, onion, pepper, parsley, clove, thyme. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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