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French Fricassee of Veal
This is made from the breast and the neck cut into small pieces and cooked in a casserole with some browned butter, salt, pepper, parsley, a blade of garlic and a bay leaf. It is served with a cream sauce to which have been added the yolks of 2 eggs.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in thrift cookery, where the writer assumes the reader already knows how a fricassee behaves. The missing information is mostly liquid, time and the handling of the egg yolks.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the two yolks go into the cream sauce it must not boil, or it will scramble into threads. Whisk a ladle of hot sauce into the beaten yolks first, return the mixture to the pan off the heat, and bring it back only to about 175F, stirring, until it coats a spoon.
- "Casserole" means the panHere it most likely means a lidded stewpan used on the stovetop rather than a baking dish, though by the early twentieth century the word was also used for a covered baking dish. A heavy Dutch oven is a suitable vessel.
- Breast and neckBoth are bony, gelatinous cuts sold cheap, which is why they are here. Ask for veal breast or neck cut across the bone into 2-inch pieces; boneless veal stew meat will work but gives a thinner sauce.
- Liquid and time, unstatedThe recipe gives none. Add water or light stock to come halfway up the meat, cover, and simmer very gently 1 1/2 to 2 hours until the meat pulls from the bone. The recipe does not say whether the cream sauce is built on the cooking liquid or made apart; reducing and using the cooking liquid is the usual approach.
- "A blade of garlic"Most likely one clove, peeled and left whole so it can be fished out.
- Browned butterThe recipe calls for browned butter, but a classic fricassee is a pale stew: take the butter only to hazelnut colour and brown the meat lightly, or the finished sauce will darken.
- Seasoning at the endSeasoning -- The recipe salts the meat at the start; taste and adjust again after the sauce has reduced. Remove the bay leaf and garlic before adding the cream, and finish with the parsley.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 to 3 lb of bone-in veal serves four, with rice, boiled potatoes or noodles to take the sauce.
Fricassee is one of the oldest surviving French cooking terms in English, in use since the sixteenth century for meat cut up, cooked in fat, then finished in its own sauce — halfway between a saute and a stew. The version thickened with egg yolks and cream at the last moment is the classic fricassee de veau a l'ancienne, and the technique is the same liaison used in blanquette and in old-fashioned chicken fricassee. Breast and neck were the cheapest parts of the calf, full of bone and connective tissue, and a long moist braise plus a rich finish was the standard way to make them worth eating.