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Another Way to Make a Fricandeau of Veal

A veal dish cooked with herbs, larded, stewed, and served with a reduced sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 247 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Another Way to Make a Fricandeau of Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut a slice of veal about 1½ inches thick and lard the top.

  2. Blanch the veal in boiling water for a moment.

  3. Stew the veal in stock with a bunch of sweet herbs until tender.

  4. Remove the veal from the saucepan and skim the sauce.

Make the glaze

  1. Strain the sauce and reduce it in another saucepan until almost evaporated.

  2. Add the veal back to the reduced sauce and glaze it.

  3. Once the larded side is well glazed, place it on a serving dish.

  4. Add a little cullis and stock to the remaining sauce to detach it from the pan.

  5. Pour the sauce over the fricandeau.

Make the sorrel sauce

  1. For the sorrel sauce, combine sorrel, lettuce, chervil, parsley, cibol, and purslane in a saucepan with butter.

  2. Cook on a brisk fire until no water remains.

  3. Add a pinch of flour moistened with cullis and gravy.

  4. Season with pepper and salt.

  5. Stew the sauce until fully cooked.

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. Sorrel + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sorrel + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chervil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Sorrel + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the dish; stewing in stock turns its connective tissue tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the herbs cook gently and carry flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sorrel sauce so it becomes smooth and coats the back of a spoon.
Sorrel
Provides a sharp, acidic flavour that brightens the green herb sauce.
Cullis
Adds concentrated meaty body and depth to the sauce that glazes and coats the veal.

The step that matters

Reduce the sauce until almost evaporated before glazing. Reducing concentrates the stock and gelatin so the sauce turns syrupy and clings to the veal. If it is under-reduced, the glaze stays thin and runs off instead of coating the meat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, sauce, sorrel, lettuce, chervil, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, sauce, sorrel, lettuce, chervil, parsley. 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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