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A Fricandeau

A stew of fricandeau with vegetables, spices, bacon, and a sorrel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Fricandeau

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the meat

  1. Add a little water to a stew-pan and cook the fricandeau until brown and tender.

  2. In another stew-pan, combine carrots, onion, turnip, celery, allspice, cloves, and black pepper.

  3. Layer the fat bacon over the vegetables.

  4. Add the fricandeau and gravy to the pan.

  5. Cover and stew until the meat is tender and has absorbed the vegetable juices.

Make the sorrel sauce

  1. Stew the sorrel with the slice of ham until tender.

  2. Squeeze out excess moisture from the sorrel.

  3. Add gravy, mushroom ketchup, vinegar, lemon pickle, butter, and sugar to the sorrel.

  4. Stir gently.

  5. Remove the ham.

  6. Blend the sorrel until smooth.

  7. Add more gravy and seasoning to taste.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Fricandeau
Provides the main cut of meat that becomes tender through slow, moist stewing.
Sorrel
Supplies the tangy, herbal body of the sauce once blended smooth.
Fat bacon
Melts slowly over the vegetables, adding fat and savoury flavour to the stew.
Carrots
Release sweetness and body into the stewing liquid as they break down.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy, smooth texture to the blended sauce.

The step that matters

Cover and stew until the meat is tender and has absorbed the vegetable juices.. Low, covered heat with liquid breaks down tough connective tissue slowly. Cooking too hard or too fast leaves the meat tough and dries the sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, turnip, celery, allspice, clove, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, turnip, celery, allspice, clove, pepper. 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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