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Turkey Fricassee
Separate the meat from the bones of some remains of cold cooked turkey, cut it into small pieces, and season it with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. Pour one teacupful of milk into a saucepan with a thin strip of lemon peel, and boil it for five minutes. Mix one dessertspoonful of cornstarch to a paste with a little cold milk, then stir it into the milk in the saucepan, and keep on stirring it over the fire for two minutes; then take out the lemon peel, remove the sauce from the fire, and allow it to cool for several moments. Add one-half ounce of butter to the sauce, put it in the cut-up meat, and stir it over the fire until hot. While the turkey is being warmed up fry some thin squares of bacon. Turn the turkey onto a hot dish, arrange the bacon around, and serve.
A leftover dish built on a thin cornstarch-bound white sauce, not the egg-and-cream liaison of a classic French fricassée. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the turkey is picked.
- TeacupfulPeriod cookbooks are inconsistent: a teacupful is usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so half to three-quarters of a cup. A full cup will work but gives a looser sauce.
- DessertspoonfulTwo level teaspoons, i.e. between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Two teaspoons of cornstarch to 6 oz of milk gives a sauce that just coats; use a scant tablespoon if you want it thicker.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. It goes in off the heat, after the starch has cooked, so it stays emulsified and glossy rather than breaking out as oil.
- Don't skip the lemon peelFive minutes of infusion in the milk is what keeps this from tasting like paste. Use a wide strip of zest with no white pith; the recipe leaves it in while the cornstarch cooks and lifts it out afterwards.
- The hinge: reheat, don't cookThe turkey is already cooked. Stir it in the sauce only until hot through, two or three minutes over low heat. Anything longer squeezes moisture out of the breast meat and turns it stringy.
- Bacon"Thin squares" means bacon cut into small squares and fried crisp. Modern bacon is often wetter and more sugared than bacon of the period; drain it well or it will slick the sauce.
- SeasoningSeason the meat before it goes in the sauce, as written, and taste again at the end. Nutmeg here should be barely detectable; a few scrapes for the whole dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of turkey; roughly 12 oz of picked meat would suit the given quantity of sauce and serve two. Scale the milk and starch together if you are working through a larger bird.
- ServingWarm the platter; a thin starch sauce chills and skins over fast. Toast points, rice or plain boiled potatoes suit it.
Oscar Tschirky's book is a working reference for a hotel kitchen and for the households that wanted to cook like one, which is why it includes something as domestic as a way to use up yesterday's turkey. The name is borrowed loosely: a fricassée is generally understood as meat cooked from raw in its own white sauce, often finished with egg yolks and cream, whereas this is a reheat in a béchamel-adjacent sauce thickened with cornstarch — an ingredient that appears to have become cheap and widely available in American kitchens by the 1890s. The lemon peel and nutmeg are older habits, seasonings often traced to eighteenth-century white sauces, and the fried bacon around the edge of the dish answers the flatness of leftover poultry.