Home › The Principles of Cookery › BEEF FRICO (Charles X.'s favourite dish)
BEEF FRICO (Charles X.'s favourite dish)
Beat and lard a juicy, tender steak of two pounds; lay it into a close-fitting covered stewpan, with equal quantities of water and vinegar. Add a little vegetable, particularly onion, and stew gently for two hours, but do not allow it to burn or stick to the pan. When cold cut the meat into strips, smear it with beaten egg, and strew over bread-crumbs well-seasoned with pepper, shallot, and salt. Fry till it is of a light brown colour, which will be in about ten minutes. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A two-stage dish: a long sour braise, then a cold rest and a crumbed fry. Almost everything depends on letting the meat go properly cold before it is cut.
- Chill it hard before slicingWarm braised beef shreds under the knife and will not hold a crumb coating. Cool the meat in its liquid, then refrigerate several hours or overnight so it firms enough to cut into clean strips.
- Equal water and vinegarThat is a far sharper braise than modern practice, closer to sauerbraten than to a stew. Long cooking blunts it, but if you want a gentler result use one part vinegar to three of water and taste before committing.
- "Lard"Threading strips of pork back fat through the meat with a larding needle. If back fat is hard to come by, a well-marbled cut such as chuck, or a couple of rashers of unsmoked streaky bacon laid over the top, will help keep it moist, though neither does quite the same job as larding.
- The cutThe book asks for "a juicy, tender steak", but two hours' gentle stewing suits a braising cut better than a grilling one; two pounds of chuck, blade or top rump would answer.
- StewpanA heavy lidded pan, tightly covered. A cast-iron casserole on the lowest burner setting keeps it from catching, which is the failure the original warns against.
- Shallot in the crumbsRaw shallot chopped into the breadcrumbs scorches in ten minutes of frying. Mince it very finely, or soften it in a little butter first and let it cool before mixing.
- FryingTen minutes is for a shallow pan of moderately hot fat, turning the strips to colour each face. The meat is already cooked; you are only crisping the coating, so pull them out when they are light brown rather than waiting on the clock.
- Yield and costFour to five as the book says, though it is a modest portion by current standards. The 3s. is a Victorian retail figure and belongs to the period, not to your shopping.
Cassell's, in a habit common to Victorian compendia, liked to hang a famous name on a dish, and Charles X, the last king of the senior Bourbon line in France, who reigned from 1824 until the July Revolution of 1830, was a serviceable one; the attribution is traditional and should not be taken as documented. The name may be a rendering of the French fricot, an informal word for a stew or made-up dish of meat, rather than the Friulian cheese frico, which is unrelated. What the method really preserves is an older, thriftier habit of cookery: a tough cut tenderised in a vinegar braise, then the cold remains re-dressed the next day in egg and crumbs and fried to something that could be sent to table in its own right. Reheating cold braised meat under a crust seems to have been a familiar economy in nineteenth-century English kitchens, and giving it a royal pedigree was one way of making leftovers respectable.