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Turkey, Fricassee Of
Cut the remains of a cold cooked turkey into neat pieces, leaving out any ugly-looking joints; make a little good white sauce, and when it is quite thick add the turkey and let it stew for a quarter of an hour. Add half a pound of button mushrooms and a little pepper. Have a ring of pastry or rice on a hot dish, pile the pieces nicely in, and pour the sauce over.
A Victorian second-day dish, written for a cook who already knew how to make a béchamel and how to build a border on a dish. The points below fill in what the entry assumes.
- The hinge: keep it barely simmeringCooked turkey put back into hot sauce for fifteen minutes over a real boil will shred and go stringy. Hold the pan at a bare tremble, just enough to heat the meat through, and treat the quarter hour as an outer limit rather than a target.
- "A little good white sauce"Roughly a pint (2 cups) suits the meat off a picked-over bird, though the recipe gives no quantity. A workable version is 2 oz butter, 2 oz flour and a pint of liquid, with turkey or chicken stock for at least half of that in place of milk — a plain milk sauce over plain cooked turkey is very flat.
- Why it says "quite thick"The turkey and mushrooms both shed liquid as they heat, so a sauce that looks correct at the start will be thin by the time it reaches the table. Start it thicker than you want to serve it.
- Button mushroomsHalf a pound is 225 g. Cook them separately in butter until they have released their water and it has evaporated, then fold them in near the end; raw mushrooms dropped into the sauce will water it down and stay squeaky.
- Seasoning the period takes for grantedThe recipe names only pepper. Salt to taste; a grating of nutmeg and a squeeze of lemon at the end are common in white fricassees of this date. Some period versions also finish with a liaison of an egg yolk beaten with a spoonful of cream, stirred in off the heat, though this entry does not call for one.
- The pastry or rice ringEither a baked border of puff paste, or plain boiled rice pressed into a buttered ring mould and turned out onto the hot dish. Both exist to hold the sauce in and to stretch a small amount of meat; a mound of rice or mashed potato does the same job.
- Reheating leftoversCooked poultry that has been refrigerated should be brought right through to steaming hot, 165°F/74°C at the centre of the pieces. Cut the turkey small enough that this happens well inside the stewing time.
- YieldOn about a pint of sauce and the meat from a picked-over bird, this would serve roughly four as a main course, or six with the rice border; the recipe gives no yield.
Fricassée is a long-established French cookery term, in use by the sixteenth century for meat cut up, cooked in fat and finished in its own sauce; in English kitchens it came by the eighteenth century to mean chiefly white meat in a pale, creamy sauce, as against a browned ragout. Cassell's carries a number of turkey entries, and the dictionary's job was in part to tell the cook what to do with a large bird over the following days. The instruction to leave out "any ugly-looking joints" is characteristic of the period's re-dressed dishes: the pastry or rice border served presentation as much as economy, turning picked cold meat into something that could be carried to table looking deliberate rather than salvaged.