Fricatelli
Chop raw fresh pork very fine, add a little salt, plenty of pepper, and two small onions chopped fine, half as much bread as there is meat, soaked until soft, two eggs; mix well together, make into oblong patties, and fry like oysters. These are nice for breakfast; if used for supper, serve with sliced lemon.- Mrs. W. F. Wilcox.
A plain pork-and-bread patty of the kind that turns up in nearly every nineteenth-century American book under some version of the name. The proportions are workable as written; the vagueness is in the frying and the doneness.
- The hinge: cook them throughGround raw pork needs an internal temperature of 160F. These patties are dense with soaked bread and eggs, so a browned exterior arrives well before the centre is done. Brown them, then finish over lower heat or with the pan covered, and check with a thermometer.
- "Fry like oysters"Most likely shallow-fried in a hot skillet in a good depth of lard or butter and turned once, rather than deep-fried in a batter. The recipe gives no depth of fat or heat level.
- "Half as much bread as there is meat"The recipe does not say whether this is by volume or by weight, nor what the bread is soaked in. Stale bread rather than fresh sliced loaf, soaked and then squeezed out hard before mixing, will hold shape better; the exact quantity is a matter of judgement.
- Chopping raw porkThe original means hand-chopped with a knife or run through a hand mincer. Shoulder ground coarse gives the closest texture; standard lean ground pork works but produces a drier patty.
- Seasoning"plenty of pepper" is the defining note here and is presumably meant generously. Note that the recipe asks only for "a little salt", so keep the salt modest and let the pepper lead; no quantities are given.
- YieldOne pound of pork with bread and two eggs makes roughly eight oblong patties, enough for four at breakfast.
- The lemonProbably not mere decoration; acid would cut the fat of fried fresh pork. The recipe says only to serve the supper version with sliced lemon.
The name is one of the many nineteenth-century American spellings of a word that circulated across northern Europe in parallel forms: German Frikadellen, Danish frikadeller, meaning a small fried cake of chopped meat extended with soaked bread. Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, and Ohio had a substantial German-speaking population by that date, which may be the route by which a Frikadelle became a Fricatelli here, though the connection is a guess and cannot be documented from the book. The bread is not padding in the pejorative sense: soaked crumb was a common way of stretching meat and keeping a lean fried patty from going hard. The suggestion to serve the same dish for breakfast plain and for supper with lemon reflects a household economy in which one preparation was expected to cover more than one meal.