SC - Fricasee again...or still, or something

[Phil & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the list!

As one of the originators of the much-maligned fricasee thread, I am prepared
to make An Official Statement ;  )

Phlip and I started out by discussing a recipe in Platina, specifically the
Millham translation, in which he describes frying meat brown, and then adding
eggs, verjuice, and various other ingredients to the pan. The extent to which
the eggs are cooked is, I believe, unclear, at least without having the recipe
in front of me, so whether this is the omelette-y frigasy or the
custardy-sauce version, I can't say, but the verjuice leads me to suspect the
latter, or something in between. I said this sounded more like a fricasee than
a fry (Millham's translated term, IIRC), to me, for several reasons:

A. This sounds pretty similar to several late-period English recipes for 	 
	browned meats bound together in a sort of omelette or tansy. Generally
	known as a fricasee, frigasy, or even frycase, they're pretty much
	identical to the dishes known as quelcechoses or kickshaws.

B. It also sounds like still later recipes found in Colonial America, which may
	well have been, and in some cases fairly certainly were, brought to North
	America by people from the North and/or West of England. Examples can 
	be found in sources like Giulielma Penn (c. ~1694?), through more recent
	ones like Mrs. Beeton, and surviving into modern sources like the
	Larousse Gastronomique and one of Jeff Smith's books, I can't tell you
	which one, they all look alike to me ;  ) . Almost all of those recipes that I
	have seen (and I obviously haven't seen them all, but it seems odd that 
	such a high percentage of what I _have_ seen should be so similar to each
	other) seem to involve a sauce including white wine and/or lemon, and
	egg yolks as a thickener. Some have flour in them (used to coat the
	chicken and brown it, but ending up as a thickening agent in the sauce)
	and some don't, relying entirely on eggs to do the job.

My suspicion is that somehow the dish evolved from being a dish of fried meat
and eggs, to a ragout of meat with an egg-based sauce (the "classical"
version), to meat in a sauce thickened in a variety of ways, some, but not
all, of which are close to the "classical" version mentioned above.

As for the relation to fried chicken, apart from the fact that it involves
frying chicken (although one can fricasee veal or rabbit, or anything else, I
assume), I could swear there are late period, or possibly the dreaded
early-post-period, recipes for fried chicken made in an almost identical way,
by browning it (maybe without flour, I'd have to look for this) and then
finishing the cooking in something like a chafing dish over warm coals in a
sauce of pan juices deglazed, IIRC, with white wine. It may or may not be
thickened further with eggs, but a swirl of butter (what we snobs call monter
au beurre) is more likely as a typical Elizabethan technique.

We seem to have come full circle...

Adamantius, whose own mom uses chix stock and the flour the chix were browned
in, the traitress, although I don't even recall her ever making the dish...
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