welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen uh welcome back to sunday
morning and the old cookbook show
today we're going to do a recipe out of
a cookbook that we've that we've worked
with before
and that's this book right here
published in 1800 in edinburgh written
by mrs fraser the practice of cookery
pastry
confectionary pickling and preserving
with directions for choosing provisions
trusting poultry etc to which is added
in appendix blah blah blah blah blah it
goes on like the entire title page is
the title of this book
um and we're going to make
something called to fricasee chickens
with a white sauce and so frequency in
of itself is
cooking usually chicken but sometimes
other birds foul and rabbits and we'll
get to that a little bit with that
cookbook
where you first fry it in some butter
and then you
braise it in a liquid and then you
finish it in a gravy or a white sauce or
a creamy sauce
which sounds
remarkably like a recipe we did a couple
of weeks ago and i didn't really delve
into
that recipe too much
we made something called smothered
chicken from an american cookbook in
1939.
and i'm going to do this recipe out of
order because the first part of this
recipe
tells you to dress the chickens and
fortunately in 2021 someone else is
dressing the chickens for me and i
didn't get whole chickens i got chicken
thighs because
i like chicken thighs and they were less
expensive this week at the grocery store
than a whole chicken so you know i went
with what i could get
so into this pot tells me to use good
veal gravy
and feel gravy
or veal stock essentially veal stock
they're not asking for gravy as we would
think of it today
in 2021 as something that's already
thickened they're asking me to use veal
stock and then to thicken it with butter
and flour so instead of veal stock i'm
using chicken stock and we're going to
thicken it with butter and flour we're
going to make what's called bermene or
bermanei
so bermane is a classic french technique
for thickening a sauce that you've
already got on the go or a stock that
you've already got on the go in order to
make a gravy
the butter or the fat or whatever fat
you're using instead of butter
coats the flour so that when you mix it
into the liquid it doesn't clump
together
the flour adds thickening
the butter adds a little bit of a
glossiness to the sauce
fantastic way for making any sort of
gravy um
turkey gravy chicken gravy any anything
like that i use it all the time you've
seen me do it before i'm ready to go
with that i'm just going to bring the
chicken stock up to a boil before i add
that in and start thickening it brings
us to the chicken
so i've got the chicken thighs here and
i have an egg yolk
and i'm going to break the egg yolk
and rub the egg yolk all over the
chicken pieces
and get them fully
coated
in egg yolk
it's messy
but your hand is the best
and only way to do this
okay clean hands now we need to season
the chicken
and the recipe tells us to use white
spice and salt
it took me a little while to sort of
read through
a lot of the recipes in this book and so
when they say white spice they mean
white pepper and they use that term
interchangeably throughout recipes in
this book miss fraser uses that term
interchangeably throughout this book and
even interchangeably within one recipe
because later in the recipe it says
white pepper so i've got white pepper
here
and white pepper is something that you
see a lot of in cooking in this time
period so i'm going to sprinkle that on
top
along with some salt
and i'm going to do both sides but i
noticed that the the chicken stock is
boiling
so we're going to use the birmingham to
thicken that up
so
i've got a clump about that big i'm
going to put that in first and see where
that gets us
and whisk
and i might put in a little bit more
just to thicken it up
a little bit further probably use all of
that
now we need to brown the chicken so the
recipe tells me to heat up some
sweet butter in a frying pan
which is unsalted butter
if you only have salted butter
it's fine use salted butter you don't
need to keep unsalted butter in your
kitchen
just because
and
the farther back you go in history
the delineation between salted and
unsalted butter becomes more and more
important today in 2021
big industrial butter
that is salted
is pretty much all salted to the same
salt content or the same amount of salt
in the butter there's a little bit of
variation between brands but for the
most part it's regulated and it's fairly
consistent and you know how salty butter
is at this point and so you can adjust
your salt somewhere else in the recipe
in this case maybe don't put as much
salt on the chicken
in 1800 when this cookbook was written
and even pretty much any time before
world war one
a lot of households would have made
their own butter
and they would have salted it completely
differently
and so there would have been a much
larger variation in salt content in
salted butter
between household the household town to
town
village to village it would have it
would have been a big deal then it's not
that big a deal today and especially not
in savory cooking
in baking
i would tend to agree that if the recipe
says use unsalted or sweet butter use
unsalted or sweet butter or
know your salt level and figure it out
and adjust in the rest of the recipe
but in a savory dish
i don't think it's that big of a deal so
i'm going to brown this at this point
in the butter at this point and it says
to brown lightly on both sides so you're
not looking for
a huge amount of color
so get the chicken in there and get it
going
so while the chicken is browning let's
talk about
fricassey
prior to world war one
fricasi turns up in pretty much every
cookbook that i own
very common recipe and in the community
cookbooks there would be many variations
on it and from cookbook to cookbook
there's lots of variations on it and
down through time it starts to you see
the variations country to country you
see the variations
this is
a very common
frequency recipe from england uk
scotland in this time period around 1800
french cookbooks do it a little bit
differently
and then you start to see it in american
cookbooks as well called frequency
and a different interpretation again
after world war one
um
in canada and the united states the term
frequency
falls out of favor
the recipe remains the recipe continues
but it takes on other names like the one
we did a couple of weeks ago called
smothered chicken
and that is
i think that's due to a whole bunch of
reasons um and you know people could
debate this forever and ever and ever
but part of it is
i have to choose my words very carefully
there are a lot of people that if you
went to their house
and brought a potluck dish or had people
over to your house and they asked you
what are we having for supper and you
said fricassee of chicken
you might get
two
very different reactions one would be oh
what's that i don't know what that is i
don't want to eat it
and the other reaction would be oh
frequency of chicken
when really this is just a very plain
simple stew
the people who think that it's going to
be elevated might be disappointed and
the people who won't eat it well they're
not going to eat it but if you drop down
something and call it smothered chicken
you're probably going to please
everybody at the table
they know immediately what it is it's
smothered they don't really care what
it's smothered in it's just smothered
and it's chicken it's going to be good
and so post-world war one you start to
see that change in language
and the simplification of the recipe
like the one we did a couple of weeks
ago
but if you go back
this is a cookbook printed published in
1685 by robert may
and it has
a fricase recipe
it's called
a rare frequency
and
it starts out takes six pigeons and six
chicken peepers or six young chickens or
six chicks
and then you go through this really long
process
but it uses yolks
eggs sweet breads
lamb bones
uses mutton gravy
oysters
uh asparagus bone marrow nutmeg
and uh clover two of garlic if you
please i mean this is a complicated
recipe but they're all kind of related
in the same way that you're you're first
frying or browning
the meat chicken in this case
and then you're poaching it or braising
it
in a stock or a sauce or wine or
something like that so
now
pour in the stock
might turn that down a little bit so
it's not on volcano
and we put the lid on
and cook that for a quarter hour
now in order to thicken up the sauce i
am supposed to cast
three yolks of eggs which i have like
cast them together until smooth and i'm
supposed to add half a gill
of cream now this is a scottish cookbook
in the in the front section it says
that both scottish measurements and
english measurements are given
except where they're the same and then
only one measurement is given in this
case it says half a gill now a gill an
imperial gill a british gill a gill used
in this time period in england in
scotland is different than a gill
used in the united states
the united states went their own way
with pretty much all of those
measurements so
when i use a gill here
in this recipe it is completely
different than a gill that the townsends
might use in one of their american
recipes
same word
different measurement
so i'm going to put that together like
that
calls for the squeeze of a lemon
so we'll get a squeeze of a lemon
just squeeze it through my fingers to
catch any pips
like that's probably a squeeze
give that a stir that's going to start
curdling
immediately
right because you put an acid in with
the eggs and the cream
now i need to
take the lid off this is cooked long
enough
i need to take some of the gravy out of
this pot
and put it in with the eggs and the
cream in order to temper it so the eggs
don't scramble when we put it back
in to thicken up the sauce so
a little bit at a time
a couple of scoops are going to be more
than enough
just to bring the temperature up
and then
we mix the whole together
get that in there
and it says to give it a shake over the
fire before serving so i'm just going to
cook this probably another five minutes
or so just to thicken up that sauce and
it started to thicken up almost
immediately
i think the sauce is going to be
fantastic the chicken is pretty much
cooked i'm just going to put the lid on
and i'm going to turn it down a little
bit
until julie gets home from work
this is the type of dish that is really
forgiving so if you put it on and think
someone's going to be home at you know 5
30 quarter to six it turns out they're
not coming home until 6 30. it's not a
big deal just turn it down put the lid
on keep it warm it's gonna be fine it's
very forgiving
so we'll see you when julie gets home
okay
hey jules
hey friends okay
uh
forks forks good to know and a knife
probably and a knife okay look at that
okay
just give the sauce a little bit of a
stir oh that looks really good okay
now it smells really good too tell me
more
frequency of chicken or chicken
fricassee
you're going to notice that it is
smothered chicken it's the same it's the
same dish that we had a couple of weeks
ago this is just going back
a little bit farther in time okay
um sure what do i know egg so sauce on
top
this is a more
involved recipe this is a more involved
recipe so the chicken is browned a
little bit nicer there'll be a little
bit more flavor to it you're supposed to
put a when as you serve it put sliced
lemon on top for the serving platter
um
really that's for later well it uses up
the lemon because you know you're only
using a squeeze of lemon so if you've
bought the lemon you might as well use
the whole lemon
oh try it out i remember the
sauce is pretty pretty
oh
that's really good
that is really good
okay
yeah
well you need to heat the sauce straight
up do you
yeah that's lovely it's moist it's got
some flavor to it yeah
so
going back a little bit a little bit
more involved
but i'm gonna say the flavor from that
sauce
is way better than the flavor from the
other sauce that we had
and it still only has salt and pepper on
it
right
what makes the difference
um
what will you surmise well like the
lemon adds a little bit of acidity
mm-hmm that pulls it together a little
bit more
we didn't use water we used chicken
stock
the recipe calls for veal stock but
using that chicken stock really sort of
bumps the flavor up we didn't have a lot
of veal stock no no
and there are proponents there is a very
famous
uh tv chef who is a large proponent of
don't use stock just use water because
the stock doesn't bring any flavor i'm
gonna fully disagree with that the stock
brings a huge amount of flavor
and there's enough sauce here
that i could have done you know three
times as many chicken thighs
yes there doesn't be a lot of stuff
there's enough sauce here to do two
small chickens
fantastic so i i think
eugene and i just can't eat too small no
we can't eat two small chickens it's not
a good plan
no so don't be afraid of recipe names
if you get freaked out by a recipe name
because it's called fricative chicken
but you make smothered chicken fricasee
doesn't mean that it's harder
and there's only a couple more steps to
this one than the simplified version and
i think the couple more steps add a lot
of extra flavor
i don't know about the one with the
pigeons though
that had a lot of extra steps i'll show
that recipe to you later
what are you talking about it's from
this it's from this cookbook from squab
from that the 1695 cooking term for
pigeon swap squab 16.85
yeah was it was it
yeah take six pigeons and six chicken
peepers
chicken peepers chicks
so not even full grown chickens what not
the little
marshmallows marshmallow peeps okay
okay yeah
this is a this is a great this is a
great recipe um so if you if you make a
simplified version bump it up a little
bit and try this one
thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you