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To Fricassée Calf’s Feet

A fricassée of calf's feet simmered with gravy, morels, pickles, eggs, and cream, finished with lemon and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Fricassée Calf’s Feet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Soak the calf's feet, remove the bones, and cut the meat into thin dice.

  2. Place the meat in a saucepan with ½ cup of good gravy and boil briefly.

Make the fricassée

  1. Add morels, 1 teaspoon of lemon pickle, mushroom powder or pickled mushrooms, and the yolks of 4 hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Season with a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Thicken the mixture with butter rolled in flour.

  4. Mix 1 egg yolk with 2 teaspoons of cream and ½ grated nutmeg, then add to the pan.

  5. Heat gently without boiling to avoid curdling the cream.

Garnish

  1. Garnish with lemon and curled parsley.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Calf's feet
Provides the meat and natural gelatin that give the fricassée body.
Butter
Mixed with flour to thicken the sauce and add richness.
Flour
Combined with butter to thicken the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and help it set to a creamy texture when gently heated.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Egg yolks in the cream can curdle and turn grainy if the sauce boils, so it should be heated gently to keep it smooth.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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