Home › Meats › Fricasseed Beef
Fricasseed Beef
Take a piece of beef from the forequarter and cook it very tender, using only water enough to cook it. When about half done season well with salt, pepper, etc. If the water does not boil away soon enough, turn it off, and let the beef fry ten minutes-it is excellent when well prepared. Take two tablespoonfuls flour, adding the fat; when mixed, pour on the hot juice of the meat. Serve with sauce.
A pot-roast written in shorthand: braise a cheap cut in barely any liquid, let the liquid cook away, brown the meat in its own rendered fat, then make gravy in the pan. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the sequence.
- The hingeThe water must be kept low enough that it boils off just as the beef becomes tender. Too much liquid and you get boiled beef with thin broth; the ten-minute fry at the end is what builds the browned surface and the fat for the roux.
- "A piece of beef from the forequarter"Chuck, shoulder clod, or arm roast — collagen-rich cuts that need long moist heat. A 3 to 4 lb boneless chuck roast fits the method exactly. Brisket also works, though it takes longer.
- Timing"Very tender" means roughly 3 hours at a bare simmer for a 3 to 4 lb piece, tested by a fork sliding out with no resistance. The method as written is a stovetop one; the recipe never mentions an oven.
- Water enough to cook itRoughly an inch in a heavy covered pot, topped up only if it threatens to scorch before the meat gives. A tight lid keeps the loss slow enough that the beef finishes just as the pan goes dry.
- "Season well with salt, pepper, etc."The etc. is the cook's discretion: a bay leaf, an onion, a little allspice or a clove turn up in comparable recipes of the period. The recipe gives no reason for salting at the halfway point rather than at the start.
- The gravyTwo tablespoons of flour stirred into the rendered fat, cooked a minute or two until it smells nutty, then the reserved meat juices whisked in off the heat to prevent lumps. Two tablespoons of flour thickens roughly a cup of liquid; if you turned off a lot of broth earlier, scale up or accept a thin sauce.
- "Serve with sauce"Confusing as written; most likely the sauce is the gravy just described. Nineteenth-century books also used "sauce" loosely for a separate accompaniment, but this recipe does not say which.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb forequarter roast serves six to eight, with mashed or boiled potatoes to take the gravy.
"Fricassee" is generally traced to a white braise of cut-up chicken or veal finished in a pale sauce, though brown fricassees have long existed alongside it, and by the late nineteenth century American household writers had stretched the word to cover almost any meat cooked slowly in liquid and served with a flour gravy. This version is essentially a pot roast under a French name, and it is a thrift recipe: the forequarter — chuck, shoulder, shin — was the cheap end of the animal, tough and full of connective tissue, and long moist cooking was the only way to make it pleasant. The abbreviated style assumes a reader who needs only reminding of the order of operations. Note also what the recipe does not waste: the fat becomes the roux, the cooking liquid becomes the sauce, and nothing leaves the pot.