Veal Fricassee
Cut meat in small pieces, sauté in melted butter.
Cover meat with boiling water and cook slowly until meat is tender.
Melt four tablespoons butter or pork fat. When brown, add one fourth cup flour browned, and four cups of water in which veal was cooked. Season with salt, pepper, onion juice and lemon juice.
Just before serving add one fourth cup cream, or two tablespoons butter.
Serve veal in center of hot platter and surround with hot sauce.
Garnish with parsley.
Dumplings may be served with this fricassee, in which case it is ordinarily called a stew.
A brown fricassee built on a browned-flour roux and the veal's own cooking liquid. The recipe gives no weight of meat, so scale it against the sauce: four cups of stock and a quarter cup of flour suit roughly 2½ to 3 lb of veal.
- Cut of vealUse shoulder or breast, cut in 1½-inch pieces; these have the connective tissue that gives the broth body. Veal cutlet or leg will go dry and stringy over a long simmer.
- "Cook slowly" means a bare simmerThe hinge of the dish. Water at a rolling boil squeezes the meat and clouds the stock; hold it at the barest tremble, covered, for 1¼ to 1¾ hours until a fork slides in with no resistance.
- Browned flourThe flour is browned dry, in a skillet or a low oven, before it goes into the fat — stir it constantly until it is the color of a paper bag. Browned flour thickens less than raw flour.
- Four cups of cooking waterYou will only have that much if the meat was barely covered to start. If reduction has left you short, top up with water or light stock rather than boiling down the roux.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon or two is enough. Onion juice turns up often in sauces of this period where visible pieces were not wanted.
- Lemon and cream at the endAdd the lemon juice off the boil and the cream last, warmed, then do not let the sauce boil again — acid and heat together can curdle it. A tablespoon of lemon juice is plenty for four cups of sauce.
- DumplingsIf you add them, drop them onto the simmering liquid and cover tightly for 12-15 minutes without lifting the lid; they steam rather than boil. The sauce then needs to be looser, since the dumplings absorb liquid.
- YieldAbout four to six servings. Rice, noodles or boiled potatoes take the sauce well if you skip the dumplings.
Fricassee is a French cooking term long established in English kitchens — a dish of meat cut up, cooked in fat, then finished in a sauce made from its own liquid — and by the nineteenth century American cookbooks divided it firmly into two kinds: the white fricassee, thickened without browning and enriched with cream, and the brown fricassee like this one, where both the fat and the flour are colored first. Veal was one common choice because it is mild and gelatinous enough to make its own sauce, and because the cheap cuts, shoulder and breast, needed exactly this kind of long moist cooking; chicken was at least as standard. The closing note is the most revealing line on the page: add dumplings and the same pot is, as the recipe puts it, ordinarily called a stew.