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Fricandelle, Boiled
Use any meat for this dish. If veal, chop the fat and lean together; but if mutton, remove the fat, and take butter instead. Chop one pound of cold roast veal, season with pepper, salt, and a little nutmeg. Mix bread-crumbs, and break an ounce of butter into bits with them; add a little good veal gravy, and a couple of eggs. Mix well, and press into a buttered mould. When boiled, the fricandelle should be turned out, and served with a brown gravy over it. Time to boil, one hour. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the cold meat Sufficient, one pound of meat for two or three persons.
A Victorian way of turning yesterday's roast into a second hot dinner: a bound meat mixture steamed in a mould and sauced. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook has to be given back — chiefly what "boiled" means for a mould, and how much breadcrumb to use.
- "When boiled" means steamed in a water bath"When boiled" most likely means cooked in water rather than in the oven -- the recipe gives no method. The safest modern reading: butter the mould, cover it tightly with buttered paper or foil and a lid or cloth tie, and set it in a pan of simmering water reaching two-thirds up its sides. Water getting inside the mould would turn the mixture to slurry, so keep the pan at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil.
- Breadcrumb quantity is not givenThe original leaves it to judgement. About a cup of soft (not dried) crumbs to a pound of chopped meat gives a mixture that holds together but is not stodgy; it should just drop from the spoon after the eggs go in.
- Chopped, not mincedThe period sense is hand-chopped on a board to a coarse hash. A food processor pulsed a few times gets close; run continuously and the result is a smooth pâté texture, which is not what the mould is for.
- Veal gravyMeaning the pan juices or a light brown veal stock, added by the spoonful — perhaps two or three tablespoons — just to moisten. Chicken or light beef stock reduced a little stands in; avoid anything heavily salted, as the mixture is already seasoned.
- The mutton variationThe recipe has you remove mutton fat and use butter instead, without saying why; the likely reason is that mutton fat sets hard and tallowy as soon as the mould cools. The same reasoning would apply to lamb or beef today.
- An hour is right for the mould, not the meatThe meat is already cooked; the hour is what the egg needs to set through a mould of this size (the recipe does not say how large a mould, though a pound of meat with crumbs and eggs suggests a small one). A shallower or smaller mould will want less. It is done when a skewer to the centre comes out hot and clean and the centre reads about 160F.
- Turning outLet the mould stand a few minutes off the heat before inverting, which makes it less likely to break up. Run a thin knife round the rim first. Serve the brown gravy over and around, not stirred through.
- Yield and costThe recipe reckons one pound of meat for two or three persons. The 4d. covers the crumbs, butter, eggs, gravy and seasoning only -- the point of the dish is that the meat is already paid for.
Fricandelle is the French and Low Countries word for a seasoned chopped-meat preparation, related to the fricadelle and frikadelle still made across Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia, where the mixture is usually shaped into balls or patties and fried. Cassell's version keeps the name but sends it in a thoroughly English direction: bound with crumbs and egg, packed into a buttered mould and steamed, it belongs to the same family as the boiled meat shapes and "puddings" that fill the re-made dishes chapters of Victorian cookery books. Those chapters existed because a middle-class household roasted large joints and expected the cold remains to reappear at least once more, decently disguised. The costing here makes the economy explicit — fourpence, exclusive of the cold meat, because the meat had already been costed against the original joint.