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Fricandeau of Veal with Cepes
Cut a three-pound piece round of veal from leg, season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons leaf lard in a saucepan, place veal in pan with a mirepoix and briskly cook for ten minutes on each side, remove from pan and keep warm. Add to the gravy two tablespoons flour, briskly stir, then add quarter of a pint claret, half pint hot broth or water, one gill tomato sauce one gill demi-glace mix well, and as soon as it comes to a boil add veal again, with a tablespoon dried cepes or dried mushrooms. Cover pan and set in moderate oven one hour and forty-five minutes, remove, dress veal on a large hot dish, reduce gravy to half pint, skim fat off surface and strain it over, arrange a cepes provencale around veal and serve.
A straightforward braise dressed in professional French shorthand: the recipe assumes you keep mirepoix, demi-glace and tomato sauce on hand, as a hotel kitchen would. Substitutions are easy once you know what the terms stand for.
- MirepoixNo quantities are given. Figure on one medium onion, one carrot and one celery rib, diced small, plus a bay leaf and a thyme sprig; it is aromatic support, not a vegetable garnish, and gets strained out at the end.
- Demi-glace and tomato sauceBoth belong to the classic brigade's sauce repertoire: demi-glace is a derivative of espagnole, while tomato sauce is itself one of the mother sauces. A gill is half a cup, so you need 1/2 cup of each. Reduced brown veal stock, or a good commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to sauce strength, stands in for the first; plain tomato pur"e or passata for the second.
- Liquid measuresQuarter of a pint of claret is 1/2 cup of dry red wine (claret meant red Bordeaux). Half a pint of broth is 1 cup. The finished sauce is reduced back to half a pint, about 1 cup.
- Leaf lardThe kidney fat of the pig, mild and clean-tasting. Any lard, clarified butter or neutral oil will brown the veal as well; two tablespoons is enough.
- Moderate oven350°F. The pan should be covered and the liquid barely trembling, not boiling — a hard braise squeezes lean veal round dry and stringy.
- Soak the cèpesDried porcini go straight into the pan here, but they will drink braising liquid unevenly. Soak the tablespoonful in warm water for 20 minutes, add the mushrooms to the pan and the strained soaking liquid to the braise; it is the best flavor in the dish.
- Judge by tenderness, not the clockOne hour forty-five minutes suits a three-pound piece of round, but check at 90 minutes. It is done when a skewer slides in with no resistance; veal round has almost no fat and goes from tender to fibrous quickly.
- Cèpes provençaleThe garnish assumes a second, separate preparation: mushrooms sautéed in oil with garlic and chopped parsley, seasoned at the end. Fresh porcini or cremini both work; keep the pan hot so they color rather than steam.
- YieldThree pounds of boneless veal serves six generously, sliced across the grain and napped with the reduced sauce.
A fricandeau is a thick slice cut from the veal leg, traditionally larded with strips of pork fat drawn through the meat with a needle, then braised and glazed — the term appears in French cookery writing from the seventeenth century onward and by the nineteenth was standard restaurant vocabulary. Filippini's version skips the larding but keeps the method: sear, braise in wine and brown sauce, reduce the liquor to a glaze. The cèpes mark it as southwestern in feeling; Boletus edulis is gathered in the oak and chestnut woods of Périgord and Gascony and dried for the rest of the year.