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Fricassee of Beef
One and one-half pints of cold meat; one pint of water; three tablespoons of butter; one and one-half teaspoons of salt; one-third teaspoon of pepper; two tablespoons of flour; one teaspoon of onion juice. Have the meat cut in generous slices. Season it with one teaspoon of salt and half that much pepper. Put the butter in a frying-pan and set on the fire; when it becomes hot add the flour and stir until smooth and brown; then draw back to a cooler place and gradually add the water, stirring all the time. Put the pan back on the hot part of the stove and season the sauce with the remaining salt, pepper and the onion juice. Simmer for five minutes; then add the cold meat and cook gently for three minutes, if it be rare beef, mutton or game; but if the meat be veal or poultry, it may cook longer. Serve on a hot dish with a border of rice, mashed potatoes or toast.
A leftovers dish: a brown roux gravy made in a frying-pan, with cold roast sliced in at the end. The only thing that can go wrong is overcooking the meat, which is already cooked.
- Meat measured by volumeA pint and a half of sliced cold meat is about 3 cups, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb of trimmed cold roast. Slice it generously as directed; thin shreds will dry out and fray in the sauce.
- LiquidOne pint is 2 cups. Water gives a thin gravy; leftover pan juices or unsalted stock in place of some of the water gives a better one without changing the method.
- The hinge: three minutesThe meat is already cooked and is only being heated through. Rare beef held longer than the stated three minutes goes grey and stringy. Have the sauce fully seasoned before the meat goes in, because there is no time to adjust afterwards.
- "Draw back to a cooler place"On a wood or coal range this meant sliding the pan to a cooler part of the top. On a modern burner, take it off the heat entirely while you add the water, then return it to medium.
- Browning the flourTwo tablespoons of flour in three tablespoons of butter is a loose roux. Cook it until it smells nutty and turns the color of light caramel, stirring constantly; browned flour thickens less than pale flour, so the sauce will stay on the thin side.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a grated shallot in your palm. A teaspoon takes one small onion.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half of salt total, presumably by the fine table salt of the period. If using kosher salt, measure by weight or start with two-thirds of the amount and correct at the end.
- YieldServes four modestly, with the rice, mashed potato or toast border doing most of the work.
A fricassee properly means meat cut up, cooked in fat and finished in its own sauce, and it is often thought of as a white dish: veal or chicken in a pale, often egg-thickened gravy. This one is the brown variety, and more to the point it is a made dish, the polite name for a second appearance of Sunday's roast. Butterick, the dress-pattern company, published its cook book for a household that ran on economy and planning. The instruction to shorten the cooking for rare beef, mutton or game and lengthen it for veal or poultry is a small piece of practical wisdom about reheating: the pinker the joint was, the less it can take a second heating.