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Fricandeau
Take three pounds of fillet of veal, trimmed, and larded with fat bacon. Put the trimmings in a stewpan, with a sliced carrot, a sliced onion, and pepper and salt to taste. Lay the veal on top; add half a pint of broth or veal stock; boil till it is reduced and becomes thick and yellow; add a pint and a half more broth or stock, and simmer for an hour and a quarter, with the stewpan half covered. Then close the vessel, lifting the lid every five minutes to baste with the gravy, until the meat is sufficiently glazed; then take it out and place it on a dish. Strain the gravy, skim off the fat, and pour over the meat. Probable cost, 3s to 4s. (See also VEAL, FRICANDEAU OF.)
A classic braise-and-glaze in two stages: the meat first sticks to a heavily reduced stock, then cooks in more liquid before being basted down to a shine. The technique is intact; only the vocabulary and the cut need translating.
- The hinge is the first reductionThe half pint of stock must cook down until the pan liquid is thick and syrupy — the recipe's "thick and yellow" — that is where the colour and the eventual glaze come from. Rush it, or add all the stock at once, and you get pale stewed veal with a thin gravy.
- Imperial liquid measuresHalf a pint here is 10 fl oz (about 1 1/4 US cups); a pint and a half is 30 fl oz (roughly 3 3/4 US cups). Cassell's pints are imperial, a fifth larger than American ones.
- "Fillet of veal" is not tenderloinIn British butchery of this period the fillet is the top of the leg — what an American butcher calls top round or leg cutlet. Ask for a solid 3 lb piece off the leg, not the loin fillet, which is far too lean and small for this treatment.
- LardingThreading strips of firm back fat or fatback through the meat with a larding needle keeps a lean leg cut moist over two hours. If you have no needle, bard instead: tie sheets of fatback or unsmoked streaky bacon over the top and sides. Modern bacon is cured and smoked and will taste of it.
- Stewpan and heatA stewpan is a heavy, straight-sided pan with a lid — a Dutch oven does the job. Simmering "half covered" means the lid ajar so the liquid keeps reducing; the same thing can be done in a 325F oven with the lid propped, which gives steadier heat than a burner.
- The glazing stageOnce the pan is closed and you are basting every five minutes, the remaining gravy is thickening into a coating. Expect 15 to 25 minutes of this; stop when the surface is deep amber and lacquered rather than waiting for a fixed time.
- Trimmings and stockThe sinew and fat trimmings under the meat are structural, not scrap — they are what makes the reduced stock gelatinous enough to glaze. If your butcher has trimmed the joint already, ask for a veal bone or two, or start with a good gelatinous veal stock.
- Doneness and yieldThe meat is meant to be sliceable and tender, not pink; around 160F internal after the long simmer. Three pounds of leg serves six generously with the strained gravy.
- Probable costThree to four shillings was the whole-dish price in Victorian money — a note for the mistress of the house, not a modern guide to anything.
Fricandeau came into English kitchens straight from French professional practice, and it demonstrates two techniques at once: larding a lean cut, and building a glaze by reducing stock in stages until it coats the meat. The word's origin is unsettled — it is generally traced to the same family as fricassée, from an old French verb for frying or cutting up — but by the eighteenth century it had a fixed meaning in both French and English cookbooks: a thick slice of veal from the leg, larded, braised, and served glazed in its own gravy. Veal held this place because it is lean, mild and gelatinous, qualities that suit the method and suited a period when calves were a routine by-product of dairying. The cross-reference to VEAL, FRICANDEAU OF is characteristic of Cassell's dictionary format, which scattered the same dish across alphabetical entries and expected the reader to follow the trail.