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Beef Fricassee
1/3 t pepper 1 t chopped onion 1 t salt Season the meat with salt and pepper. Melt butter in a spider, add flour and stir to a brown paste. Pour in the stock and beat smooth. Add onion and cook ten minutes. Add cold meat, simmer a few minutes and serve on a deep platter with a border of rice, mashed potatoes or points of toast.
Mrs. Elmer Huffman.
A leftover-roast dish built on a brown roux. The printed ingredient list has come down incomplete, so read the method first and scale from there.
- The list is truncatedOnly pepper, salt and onion carry amounts; the meat, butter, flour and stock do not. A brown sauce in this style is conventionally equal parts butter and flour by volume with about eight times as much stock, but the original gives no figures and none should be attributed to it.
- SpiderA spider was a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with short legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet works; you want a pan that holds steady heat while the flour browns.
- Brown the roux properlyThis is the hinge of the dish. The butter and flour must cook past blond to the colour of a copper penny, stirred constantly, or the sauce tastes of raw flour and the fricassee is pale and flat. Expect five to eight minutes over medium heat.
- Beat smoothAdd the stock gradually and whisk hard after each addition. Cooks differ over whether warm or cold stock lumps less; either will come smooth with enough beating.
- Cold meatThis means yesterday's roast beef, sliced or cut in bite-size pieces. It is already cooked, so "simmer a few minutes" is literal: two or three minutes to heat through. Longer and the beef goes dry and stringy in its own sauce.
- Salt with the stock in mindThe teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted homemade stock. With commercial broth, salt at the end instead.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no quantity of meat or stock, so the yield depends on what is left over. The rice, mashed potato or toast points are not garnish but the substance of the plate; pipe or spoon them as a ring and pour the fricassee inside.
Fricassee comes into English from French in the sixteenth century, from fricasser, to cut up and cook in sauce, and it long meant meat cut small and finished in a made sauce rather than roasted whole. Classically it is white, with a pale roux and often cream and egg yolk; a browned-flour version like this one belongs to the American branch of the word, where "fricassee" drifted toward any cut-up meat in gravy.