Home › Meats › Veal Fricandeau
Veal Fricandeau
Take three pounds of veal, pare off the skin and trim the joint into an oval shape. Lard this neatly and thickly with narrow strips of bacon. Put into a stew pan on a bed of carrots and onions, and a bouquet garni. Add enough stock to cover the veal; then put over a piece of buttered paper and stew very gently for one and a half hours, basting it constantly. When cooked, place the veal on a baking sheet in a hot oven, flour it thickly and let it brown. Strain the stock, free it from grease and boil it down to half glaze. Serve the veal with the sauce round and a garnish of tomatoes.
A classic braise-then-glaze treatment for a lean cut, written for cooks who owned larding needles and had stock always on hand. Two techniques carry the dish: the larding and the reduction.
- The cutA fricandeau is properly cut from the veal cushion (top round) or the leg, sliced thick with the grain running across so it can be trimmed to an oval. Ask a butcher for a 3 lb piece of veal top round in one solid block; loin or shoulder will not hold the shape.
- LardingNarrow strips of bacon or salt pork fat are threaded through the surface of the meat with a larding needle at close intervals. Without a needle, the practical substitute is to bard the top: lay overlapping strips of bacon or fatback across the meat and tie them on. Veal round has almost no internal fat and will be dry without one or the other.
- Buttered paperA cartouche. Cut a round of parchment the diameter of the pan, butter one side, and lay it directly on the liquid to slow evaporation while still letting steam escape. Modern parchment does the job; the pan lid is not the same thing.
- Stew very gentlyBare simmer, around 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil will squeeze and toughen the muscle before it tenderises. An oven at 300F holds the temperature more reliably than a burner.
- Basting it constantlyThe point is to keep the larded surface glossy and to build colour. If you cover the meat completely with stock, as the recipe says, basting is largely redundant; braising with liquid coming halfway up the meat and basting every 20 minutes gives a better result.
- Bouquet garniParsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, or bundled in a leek leaf. Tie the string to the pan handle so it comes out in one pull.
- Hot oven for the browning425-450F. Flour the surface thinly rather than "thickly" - a heavy dredge on wet meat turns to paste. Ten to fifteen minutes is usually enough to set a brown crust.
- Half glazeThe strained braising liquid boiled down until it coats a spoon and is distinctly sticky, part-way to a glaze. Skim the fat off first, and salt only at the end, since reduction concentrates whatever was in the stock.
- YieldThree pounds of boneless veal serves six generously. The recipe specifies only 'a garnish of tomatoes' and gives no method for them.
Fricandeau is French, in English cookbooks since at least the eighteenth century, and refers less to a sauce than to a shape and a method: a thick slice of veal from the leg, larded, braised in stock and finished with a glaze. It was one of the set pieces of the classical repertoire, and its appearance in a household book of this period says something about how far French terminology had travelled into middle-class kitchens - the writer assumes the reader owns a larding needle and knows what a bouquet garni is, without explaining either. The two-stage finish, braising and then browning in a hot oven, is characteristic of the period's larger cookery: meat cooked to tenderness in liquid, then dried and coloured so it would not arrive at table looking boiled. Veal was more common on nineteenth-century tables than it is now, dairy farming producing a steady supply of male calves.