Salmi

A salmi is a ragout made by partially roasting game such as pheasant or partridge, cooking it in a saucepan with mushrooms, and then serving it in a sauce made from its juices and wine. It has long been assumed that salmi is simply an abbreviation of the dish named salmagundi. However, as a ragout, salmi has less in common with salmagundi—originally a salad of sliced meat and vegetables—than it does with a much older dish known as salomene, also made by taking game and roasting it, cooking it, and serving it in a wine sauce. The difficulty in deriving salmi from salomene, however, is that the name salomene does not appear in print after the fifteenth century (suggesting that around then it died as a word), and yet the name salmi did not appear in print until the middle of the eighteenth century, three hundred years later. Although sperm banks have now made it commonplace for dead men to father children, it is unusual for an apparently long-defunct word to suddenly spawn a scion. If salmi does derive from salomene, then either salomene remained current in spoken language until at least the eighteenth century, all the while avoiding being recorded in print, or else salmi was consciously adapted from salomene by some eighteenth-century chef who was perusing dusty old cookbooks that had been forgotten in an attic for three hundred years. Either way, the ultimate origin of the older word, salomene, is also unknown.