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Fricassee of Veal
Wipe two pounds sliced veal, cut from loin, and cover with boiling water; add one small onion, two stalks celery, and six slices carrot. Cook slowly until meat is tender. Remove meat, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in pork fat. Strain liquor (there should be two cups). Melt four tablespoons butter, add four tablespoons flour and strained liquor. Bring to boiling-point, season with salt and pepper, and pour around meat. Gar nish with parsley.
A plain white fricassee: the veal is poached first, then browned, and the poaching liquid becomes the sauce. Two notes matter most — the simmer must stay lazy, and the flour needs time in the butter.
- The cut"Sliced veal cut from loin" means slices off the boneless loin, thickness unspecified; a scant half-inch is a reasonable reading. Or ask for veal shoulder or breast cut into 1½-inch pieces: loin is lean and pricey, while shoulder gives a better sauce and stands up to the double cooking.
- Cook slowly means barely bubblingA hard boil squeezes veal tight and clouds the liquor. Hold the water at the point where bubbles break only occasionally — 180–190°F. Sliced loin needs about 30–40 minutes, shoulder chunks closer to 1¼ hours.
- Two cups of liquorThe recipe expects two cups of strained liquor when the meat comes out, so start with just enough boiling water to cover. If you end up with more, reduce it before making the sauce or the gravy will taste thin.
- Pork fatFresh leaf lard or rendered fat from salt pork. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works; a spoonful of bacon fat will also do, though it adds a smokiness the original need not have had.
- Cook the rouxFour tablespoons each butter and flour into two cups liquid gives a medium-thick sauce, on the heavy side for a modern gravy. Let the flour bubble in the butter two or three minutes before the liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty — and thin it with extra stock if you want it pourable.
- DredgingFlour the salted, peppered veal just before it hits the fat. If it sits, the coating goes gummy and sloughs off in the pan.
- EnrichmentWhite fricassees of the period were sometimes finished with a little cream, or with an egg yolk beaten with lemon juice, stirred in off the heat. Neither is in this version, but both are period-appropriate and both help a sauce made from a lean poaching liquid.
- YieldTwo pounds of veal serves four, with rice, boiled potatoes or noodles to take the sauce.
Fricassee is an old French cooking term in English — recorded by the sixteenth century, from fricasser, generally glossed as to fry or stew, though the derivation is uncertain — and it names a method rather than a dish: meat cut small, cooked in liquid, served in its own thickened sauce. The dividing line in nineteenth-century American cookbooks was between brown fricassee, where the meat is floured and browned first, and white, where it is not; this recipe sits oddly between the two, poaching first and browning after, which gives colour on the meat while keeping the liquor pale enough for a white sauce. Veal appears heavily in the Boston Cooking-School book because it was cheap and everywhere in Eastern cities in the 1890s — a position it has entirely lost since. The technique of finishing with a butter-and-flour sauce built on the cooking liquid is the same lesson Farmer taught over and over: nothing with flavour in it goes down the drain.