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VEAL, FRICASSEE OF (another way.)
Cut two pounds of veal into neat pieces free from skin, bone, or fat. Melt a slice of butter in a saute-pan, put in the veal, and cook it very gently for five minutes, being specially careful that it does not acquire any colour. Pour on as much stock, or milk and stock, as will cover the veal, and simmer gently for about twenty minutes, or until quite tender. Flavour with mace, salt, and white pepper, and add half an inch of lemon-rind, if liked. Thicken the sauce with cornflour, and add a quarter of a pint of good cream, then take the sauce off the fire, and let it cool. Beat the yolks of two eggs. Mix a little of the sauce with them, add them gradually to the rest, and shake the pan over the fire for a minute or two. Serve the preparation on a hot dish, and garnish with slices of lemon. Time, three-quarters of an hour.
A classic white fricassee: veal poached pale in stock, the sauce thickened first with cornflour and then finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things decide whether it works — keeping all colour out of the pan, and keeping the finished sauce below a simmer.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce is held at no more than a bare shiver — around 175-180F. Boiling will curdle the yolks into threads and no amount of whisking will bring the sauce back. The instruction to cool the sauce first, then temper the yolks with a little of it, exists for exactly this reason and should not be skipped.
- No colour at any stageA fricassee is a white stew. Use a heavy pan over low heat, keep the butter foaming rather than browning, and turn the veal so it stiffens without taking on any gold. If the butter starts to colour, pull the pan off the heat.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint of cream is 5 imperial fluid ounces, about 140 ml or a generous half cup. Two pounds of veal is 900 g.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is American cornstarch. Slake about two teaspoons in a little cold stock or milk before adding, and let it cook a minute so it loses its raw taste. Cornstarch sets more firmly as it cools, so err on the thin side.
- MaceThe original says only 'flavour with mace'; this most likely means a blade of whole mace, which would be lifted out before serving. Ground mace works — a scant quarter teaspoon for this quantity — but it will speckle a sauce that is meant to be ivory-white.
- Lemon rindHalf an inch of pared rind, no pith. The recipe adds it after the simmer, just before the sauce is thickened, so it flavours only briefly; lift it out before serving. It sharpens a sauce that is otherwise very rich.
- The cutShoulder or leg cut into 1½-inch pieces suits the twenty-minute simmer. Boneless veal breast needs longer and more liquid. Check with a fork rather than the clock.
- YieldTwo pounds of trimmed veal serves four generously, five at a stretch. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or triangles of fried bread are common accompaniments; the recipe itself calls only for a garnish of lemon slices.
Fricassée is one of the oldest surviving French cookery term in generally traced to the sixteenth century in English, and by the Victorian period it had narrowed to mean specifically a white stew of pale meat \ veal, chicken, rabbit \ in which the flesh is stiffened in butter without browning and finished in its own creamy sauce. Cassell's gives several versions because the fricassee was a workhorse of the late-nineteenth-century middle-class table: it used cheaper cuts, stretched a small quantity of meat with sauce, and produced something that looked genteel on a hot dish with lemon slices around the rim. The egg-and-cream liaison at the end is the older technique of the two thickenings in this recipe; the cornflour is the Victorian addition. Veal itself was far more common in British cooking then than now, being the by-product of a dairy industry that had little use for bull calves.