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Fricassee of Cold Meat

A sauce of butter, flour, water, salt, pepper, and onion juice served over sliced cold meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fricassee of Cold Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Season the cold meat with 1 teaspoon of salt and ½ teaspoon of pepper.

  2. In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  3. Add the flour and stir until smooth and brown.

  4. Remove the pan from heat and gradually add the water, stirring continuously.

Finish the fricassee

  1. Return the pan to the heat and season the sauce with the remaining salt, pepper, and onion juice.

  2. Simmer for 5 minutes, then add the cold meat.

  3. Cook gently for 3 minutes if using rare beef, mutton, or game; cook longer for veal or poultry.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cold meat
Forms the main body of the dish, and gentle cooking in the sauce keeps it tender.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the pan and enriches the sauce with fat.
Flour
Cooked with the butter, it forms a roux whose starch thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the water off the heat. Flour starch clumps when hot liquid hits it all at once. Removing the pan from the heat and adding the water gradually while stirring keeps the roux smooth, so the sauce thickens evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, pepper, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, pepper, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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