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Fricadelles
Mince some cold-cooked beef and add a slice or two of onion finely chopped, and if the meat is very lean a slice or two of fat pork may be added; season with salt, pepper, sage, thyme, a little lemon juice and parsley, using a little of each, and add a quarter as much breadcrumbs or boiled rice as there is meat; add one beaten egg with sufficient water or stock to form a paste. Make this into balls or egg shapes, put them into a frying pan with butter or dripping and fry to a brown color, or they may be dipped in breadcrumbs, brushed over with egg, then dipped in crumbs again and fried in boiling fat. When done drain and serve on a folded napkin spread over a dish.
A cold-meat recipe with proportions rather than measurements, which is the point of it: the quantities follow whatever roast you have left. A few of Oscar's assumptions need translating.
- The binding ratioBreadcrumbs or boiled rice at one quarter the meat is the hinge, though the recipe does not say whether that quarter is by weight or by volume. Much more and the fricadelles taste of filler; much less and they may crumble in the pan. One egg suits roughly a pound of minced meat.
- Water or stock "to form a paste"Add it a tablespoon at a time. The mixture should hold a shape when squeezed but still feel soft; if it becomes slack it will spread rather than brown.
- Fat porkProbably fresh unsmoked pork fat or fatback rather than bacon, whose cure and smoke would carry through the whole dish; in American books of this period "fat pork" can also mean salt pork, which will serve if rinsed of surface salt. An ounce or so per pound of lean beef is about right for the recipe's "slice or two".
- DrippingBeef fat saved from roasting. Clarified butter, lard or a neutral oil all stand in; the shallow-fried version wants a fat that will take a hard brown without burning.
- "Boiling fat"For the crumbed version this means deep fat at 350-375F, not fat literally at a boil. Fat does not boil at any temperature you want in a kitchen, and the phrase in period books simply means hot enough to bubble vigorously around the food.
- Season before you commitFry a teaspoon of the mixture flat in a pan and taste it. Sage and thyme on cold beef are easy to overdo, and Oscar's "a little of each" gives no help.
- Cooking throughAlready-cooked meat only needs heating, so the browning is the timer: roughly 3-4 minutes a side for egg-shaped fricadelles in a pan, 3-4 minutes total in deep fat. Long frying dries them out.
- Yield and servingA pound of cold beef makes eight to ten fricadelles, enough for three or four. The folded napkin is there to absorb fat; a wire rack and a warm platter do the job with less laundry.
Fricadelle belongs to a family of words for a fried patty or ball of minced meat found across northern Europe — German Frikadelle, Danish frikadeller, Dutch frikadel — and the direction of borrowing between German and French is disputed rather than settled, with some authorities tracing it instead to French fricandeau. In a book from the Waldorf's kitchen the recipe sits in a long tradition of dishes designed around yesterday's roast: a hotel of that scale generated cold cooked beef in quantity, and so did the households that bought the book. Serving on a folded napkin is characteristic turn-of-the-century service for fried food, the linen taking the grease before it reached the table.