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Fowl, Fricasseed
Take cold boiled fowl; cut it up, and simmer in gravy with onion, mace, lemon-peel, white pepper, and a bunch of herbs; a bit of knuckle of veal added will be an improvement; stew for twenty minutes. Mix up a bit of butter and flour; put this into the gravy, with a little cream, a dash of nutmeg, and salt to taste. When thickened it is ready to serve.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled fowl: gently reheated in a spiced white gravy finished with butter, flour and cream. The whole thing hangs on keeping the pan below a boil once the cream goes in.
- Start with cooked meatThe fowl is already boiled, so the twenty minutes is about infusing the gravy, not cooking the bird. Simmer at a bare tremble; a rolling boil will shred the flesh and squeeze it dry.
- "Gravy" means stockIn this period gravy is the strained cooking liquor or a light meat broth, not a thickened brown sauce. Use about 1 pint (500 ml) of chicken stock for a jointed 3–4 lb bird, enough to barely cover the pieces.
- Mace and nutmegMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself. A single blade, or a pinch of ground mace, is plenty; both spices should sit under the sauce rather than announce themselves.
- Knuckle of vealAdded chiefly for gelatine, and for a little extra savour, giving the sauce body as it cools. A veal knuckle is still sold by good butchers; a couple of chicken wings or a split trotter do a similar job, and the sauce is perfectly good without.
- The butter and flourThis is beurre manié — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, roughly 1 oz (30 g) of each. Whisk it in a little at a time off a hard boil and let it cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Cream at the endAdd about 4 fl oz (120 ml) of double or heavy cream after the thickening, and keep the pan below simmering. Lighter cream is the more likely to split if the sauce is allowed to boil.
- Lemon-peel and herbsUse pared zest with no white pith, and pull it out before serving along with the herb bundle. The recipe says only 'a bunch of herbs'; parsley, thyme and a bay leaf are a usual combination. Neither peel nor herbs are meant to be eaten.
- Yield and servingOne boiled fowl fricasseed will feed about four. Fricassees of this kind were commonly accompanied by plain boiled rice, sippets of fried bread, or forcemeat balls.
Fricassée is one of the oldest French terms in English cookery, in print here since at least the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it generally meant meat cut small and stewed in a sauce rather than roasted or plainly boiled. By the Victorian period the white fricassee of fowl had settled into a fixed idea: pale gravy, mace and lemon-peel for perfume, cream and a butter-and-flour liaison to finish. Its logic is thrift as much as flavour — a fowl boiled for one dinner reappears the next day transformed, which is why so many nineteenth-century recipes for it begin, as this one does, with cold cooked meat. The knuckle of veal is a reminder of a kitchen that kept bones and gelatinous cuts on hand as a matter of course, before stock came in cartons.