Home › Poultry › Another Mode to Fricassee Chicken
Another Mode to Fricassee Chicken
Cut the joints separate. Stew in water enough to cover until the meat is tender. Mix with a cup of milk, a heaping teaspoonful of flour, and let boil up once. Season with salt and pepper, and place on a platter. If the flavor is liked, a little salt pork may be added, cut in thin slices, a few minutes before serving. For a brown fricassee pour off the larger part of liquor before the chicken is done, adding a piece of butter, and letting the chicken fry brown in the pot.
A plain white fricassee with a brown variation tucked into the last sentence. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a fricassee looks like, so the gaps are worth filling.
- Whose milk goes where"Mix with a cup of milk, a heaping teaspoonful of flour" means whisk the flour into the cold milk until smooth, then stir that slurry into the simmering pot liquor. Added dry, the flour will lump.
- The thickening is thinOne heaping teaspoon of flour to a cup of milk plus the cooking water gives a very loose sauce by current taste. Two tablespoons of flour to the cup of milk produces the gravy most people expect, and it still needs a full minute at a boil to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Reduce before you add the milkA whole cut-up bird covered with water yields far more liquid than a cup of milk can carry. Lift the chicken out and boil the broth down by half or more first, or the sauce will be soup.
- TimingJoints of a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken need 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, breast pieces pulled sooner than legs and thighs. Anything past a slow bubble tightens the meat and clouds the broth.
- Temperature to look forDark meat is best at 175-180F, where the connective tissue has softened; breast is done at 165F. The recipe's own gauge is simply that the meat be tender.
- The salt porkSliced salt pork added a few minutes before serving will be flabby and untoasted rather than crisp. Render the slices in a dry pan until crisp and lay them on at the end, and cut back the added salt, since the pork and the reduced broth both carry plenty.
- The brown versionFor the brown fricassee, pour off the larger part of the liquor as directed, add butter, and let the pieces color in the pot over medium heat, turning once. Dry the surfaces first with a towel or they steam rather than brown. Keep the poured-off broth to build the sauce.
- YieldOne chicken serves four, with rice, boiled potatoes or biscuits to take the sauce.
Fricassee is one of the oldest French terms in the English kitchen, in print here since the sixteenth century, and it describes a method rather than a dish: meat cut up, cooked in liquid, and served in a sauce made from that liquid. The white and brown division this recipe sets out is the classic one, and by 1900 the white version was well established in American cooking, thickened with milk and flour rather than the egg-and-cream liaison of French practice. The title alone shows this is not the book's only fricassee, a sign of how routine the dish was; chicken was often an older, tougher bird from the yard rather than a young broiler, and long stewing suited it. The optional salt pork is the American note, the same barrel pork that flavored beans, chowder and greens, standing in for the bacon or lardons a French cook would have reached for.