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Salmis of Cold Game, Goose, or Duck

A sauce made with butter, flour, broth, wine, shallots, herbs, and lemon, served over cold game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Salmis of Cold Game, Goose, or Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter with the flour without browning it.

  2. Add the broth, red wine, shallots, mixed herbs, pepper, and salt; boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice.

Prepare and serve

  1. Cut the warm game or duck into pieces, but do not boil it in the sauce.

  2. Garnish the bottom of a serving dish with fried bread slices and place the game on top.

  3. Pour the sauce over the game and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the roux base and carries flavor into the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter into a roux.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce during boiling.
Broth
Provides the liquid body of the sauce.
Shallots
Add a mild aromatic sweetness that infuses the sauce as it boils.

The step that matters

Keep the game out of the boiling sauce. Boiling cooked meat toughens its proteins and makes it dry and stringy. Cutting the game and adding it to the sauce without boiling keeps it tender and moist.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, red wine, shallot, pepper, bread):

  1. Plumfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, red wine, shallot, pepper, bread. 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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