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Beef, Fricandeau Of
Lard about three pounds of the rump or fillet or sirloin. Pound three or four cloves, six whole allspice, and two blades of mace. Mix a little pepper and salt with these ingredients, and sprinkle it over the meat. Put it into a stewpan with a pint of medium stock, a glass of white wine, a bunch of savoury herbs tied together, two shallots, and a little more pepper and salt. Stew the meat very slowly for two hours, when it will be done. Remove it from the stewpan and cover to keep hot. Skim all the fat from the gravy, strain, and set it over the fire to boil till it is reduced to a glaze. Then pour it over the top, and send it to table with sorrel round the dish. Sorrel, like spinach, requires good washing and picking; put it into a stewpan with only the water that clings to it. Stir well to prevent sticking or burning; drain out all the water; this must be done effectually; add a little butter and some good gravy, and stew till done. A little sugar may be added if there is too much acidity. Stew the sorrel for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 5s. 6d. Sufficient for six persons.
A larded braise finished with its own reduced cooking liquor, served on a bed of stewed sorrel. Two things decide whether it works: the cut you choose and how far you take the reduction.
- Larding, and what to do insteadLarding means threading strips of pork back fat through the meat with a larding needle, which keeps a lean joint moist through a long stew. Without a needle, cut deep slits with a thin knife and push in batons of fatty salt pork or unsmoked bacon.
- Choose the cut deliberatelyFillet and the eye of a sirloin are tender but very lean, and two hours of stewing will leave them dry and grey. Rump is the sound choice here; if you want a cut that improves over two hours, top rump or thick flank behaves better still.
- Two hours is a minimum, not a ruleA 3 lb piece of rump at a bare simmer will be sliceable at two hours but genuinely tender nearer three. Keep the liquid at a lazy bubble, never a rolling boil, or the outside shreds before the centre gives.
- "Medium stock"Victorian cookery books, Cassell's among them, distinguish stocks of different strengths; medium is an ordinary unreduced beef or veal stock, lightly seasoned. A pint is 20 fl oz in British measure, roughly 2.5 cups, and it will not cover the meat -- that is intended, this is a braise.
- A glass of white wineTaken as a wine glass of the period, usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure was never standard. Dry is better than off-dry, since the liquid is going to be reduced to a glaze and any sweetness concentrates with it.
- Reducing to a glazeSkim and strain first, then boil hard. You are looking for a syrupy liquid that coats the back of a spoon and just runs; a pint reduces to a few spoonfuls. The recipe has already salted both the meat and the liquor, and reducing concentrates that, so taste before adding any more.
- SpicesMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as blades or ground; two blades is somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon ground. The allspice and cloves are pounded and sprinkled on the meat before it goes into the pan, though they will flavour the stewing liquor too.
- The sorrelSorrel collapses like spinach and loses most of its volume, so allow a generous pound or more for six. Twenty minutes is long by current taste -- it will be a soft green pur"it "effectually" matters, as sorrel throws a lot of water and will thin the butter and gravy into a soup. Cook it in stainless or enamel, not bare iron or aluminium, which reacts with the acid.
- YieldSix, as stated. The cost of 5s 6d is Victorian retail and tells you only that this was a middling household dish, not a grand one.
A fricandeau is properly a larded, braised and glazed cushion of veal, cut from the leg with the grain and served with its reduction poured over -- one of the set pieces of French cookery that English kitchens took up wholesale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cassell's, like several English household dictionaries of the period, extends the name to beef treated the same way, which is a frugal substitution rather than a classical one: beef was cheaper and more familiar than the pale milk-fed veal the original assumed. The sorrel border is the traditional accompaniment; fricandeau " and sorrel is a standing pairing in French practice, the acidity of the leaf cutting the fat of the larding and the sweetness of the glaze. Sorrel was a common kitchen-garden plant in Britain well into the nineteenth century, and the book pauses to explain how to handle it.