Bacon Fraise
Take a nice piece of middling about six inches square, pare off the skin and cut in small square pieces, then fry it. Make a batter of three pints flour, five eggs, one handful parsley, chopped fine. Beat all light and fry with bacon. Serve hot. This will make two dishes.--Mrs. M.D.
A froise is bacon cooked into a thick egg pancake, and this version is written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew how it went. Two things need filling in before it will work: the liquid, and the size of the pan.
- The batter is incomplete as writtenThree pints of flour (roughly six cups) and five eggs will not make a batter — there is no liquid listed. A froise batter of this proportion wants a generous quantity of milk, added until it pours like heavy cream. Treat the flour figure as the outer limit and work backward from the consistency rather than the measurement.
- MiddlingSide meat from the belly, between the ham and the shoulder — what is now sold as slab bacon or fresh pork belly. A six-inch square with the rind pared off is roughly a pound or more, depending on how thick the slab is. Sliced supermarket bacon works but gives a thinner, crisper result than the small cubes intended here.
- Pare off the skinThe rind on a country-cured slab is tough and will stay tough. Cut it away before dicing; it can go into a pot of beans.
- Fry with baconMeaning fry the batter in the rendered bacon fat, with the crisped cubes stirred through it. Render the pork first over moderate heat, remove the pieces, pour the batter into the hot fat, then scatter the pork back over the top.
- Pan and handlingA heavy skillet, eight to ten inches, is the vessel. Cook until the underside is set and browned, then either flip it whole or slide it under a broiler to finish the top — a batter this thick will not cook through from below alone.
- ParsleyA handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped, is about half a cup loosely packed. It goes in at the end of the beating so it stays green.
- Yield"Two dishes" probably means two platters for a family table, which at this quantity would feed a large household. Halving it is sensible for most kitchens, and the half-batch fits one skillet.
A froise, fraise or fraze is one of the oldest surviving English fried dishes: bacon or other meat set into an egg batter and cooked in its own fat, recorded in cookery manuscripts well before the printed cookbook and still turning up in eighteenth-century English collections under names like "a froise of bacon." The origin of the word is uncertain: it is often linked to French frire, to fry, though it has also been derived from Old French froissier, to bruise or break. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), contributed here by a housewife identified only by the initials "Mrs. M.D.," shows how long these plain English farmhouse dishes persisted in the American South, where home-cured middling meat was a staple fat and flavouring of the kitchen. The recipe's brevity — no milk, no pan, no time — is characteristic of the book, which was compiled from contributors who assumed their readers had made the thing before.