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Fricandeau
Mrs. J. M. Brown and Mrs. M. L.
Three and one-half pounds of cold roast veal chopped fine, one tablespoon of salt and one of pepper, one-half of a nutmeg, four or five rolled crackers, three eggs. If the veal is thin, add a piece of butter half as large as an egg, and a tablespoon of cream. Form all this in a large roll, and spot the roll over with bits of butter; then strew over it the pounded crackers, (a little of the cracker should be mixed with the meat), put it in the oven, and from time to time add a little water. Cook slowly two hours. When cold, slice thin, and it makes an excellent relish.
This is a cold veal loaf built from leftover roast, meant to be sliced thin for the tea table rather than served hot. Two things need adjusting before you start: the pepper and the oven temperature.
- The pepper is a misprint in spirit, if not in factA full tablespoon of black pepper against 3½ lb of meat will overwhelm everything. Use a rounded teaspoon and correct upward after frying a spoonful of the mixture to taste. The tablespoon of salt is roughly right for that weight if the roast was unseasoned; halve it if the veal was already salted.
- "Cook slowly" means 300-325F"Cook slowly" — The recipe gives no temperature; a slow modern oven, somewhere around 300-325F, suits the purpose. The meat is already cooked, so the two hours are there to set the eggs, dry the surface and let the loaf firm enough to slice thin. At anything hotter the outside risks hardening before the centre sets.
- Rolled crackersPlain soda or water crackers crushed with a rolling pin; four or five of the old large crackers may come to roughly a cup of coarse crumbs. Saltines are the nearest modern match. The recipe wants only "a little" of the cracker mixed into the meat, with the rest strewn over the outside.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates out to about 2 to 3 teaspoons, so this means roughly a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Grate it yourself; pre-ground is flat by comparison.
- Butter "half as large as an egg"About 2 tablespoons, roughly an ounce. Add it if the veal is lean, as roast veal usually is.
- The pan and the waterShape the roll in a shallow baking dish rather than a loaf tin so the crumb crust stays dry. The recipe does not say where the water goes; adding it to the pan a few tablespoons at a time, rather than over the loaf, keeps the bottom from scorching and the meat from drying out.
- Chill before slicingThe instruction "when cold" is not optional. Warm, the loaf crumbles; refrigerated overnight and wrapped, it cuts into clean thin slices for sandwiches or a cold plate.
- YieldAbout eight to ten servings as a sliced cold dish. It keeps three or four days refrigerated.
In classical French cookery a fricandeau is a thick cushion of veal from the leg, larded with strips of fat and braised until it can be cut with a spoon — a set piece of the professional kitchen. What the contributors to this book mean by the word is something else entirely: a thrifty loaf of yesterday's roast, bound with egg and cracker, baked slowly and eaten cold. That drift is characteristic of American community cookbooks of the period, where French names travelled faster than French methods and often ended up attached to whatever a household actually made. The dish also shows how veal was treated in the period — a large roast served hot on the first day, then reworked into a "relish" for tea or supper, the standing solution to leftovers in a house without refrigeration. The double attribution to two subscribers is typical of the collection's compiled-by-committee origins.