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Such a delightful word–it rolls off the tongue with a musical quality and promises of a tasty treat. Used both as a noun (a fricassee) and a verb (to fricassee), the word is relatively old, appearing as early as 1490 in French cookbooks, and by 1568 in England, but its origin and etymology are surprisingly brief. It is speculated that it is a portmanteau word combining the French ‘frire’ -to fry with French ‘casser” to  break. Perhaps that accounts for some rather gruesome connotations the word has acquired.

First, there is Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, which is anything but modest. In his biting satire of the English mishandling of Irish economy, he claims a fricassee or stew of the very young children of the poor would help solve the problem of poverty in Ireland. I can’t help but think of this preposterous idea whenever I hear of a recipe for fricassee.

While real recipes for fricassees usually call for chicken not children, one can’t ignore the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. Was he thinking of fricassee when he said,  “Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” You might ask, what does this have to do with fricassee?

Well, although grinding young Jack’s bones is the more common rendition of the rhyme, I’ve always heard it as ‘break his bones to make my bread.’ The connection becomes clearer when you consider the recipe in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, for Frykecy (40). After killing and flaying the animal hot, the cook is instructed to break the bones of a chicken or hare with a pestle. To be fair, ‘break bones’ in cookery can mean dismember or cut apart, though I’m not sure exactly how that is done with a pestle. It seems a fairly violent method of cooking, rather in line with the giant’s idea.

So what exactly is a fricassee? It is a sort of stew made with cut up meat, and fried before it is stewed (or sometimes stewed before it is fried). It is usually made of chicken or rabbit, with varying spices. Early fricassee recipes use egg yolks to thicken the gravy. Later recipes use flour. In the 17th century fricassees could be made of eggs, lambstones, veal, or sweetbreads, or even chicken-peepers (which are young chickens) and pigeons, head and all. By the 18th century, the more familiar fricassee appeared. These recipes leave out the heads and innards and thicken the gravy with a bit of flour to help stabilize it.

So in spite of all the gruesome connotations, fricassee today is as delightful to eat as it is to say.

A modern fricassee (based on Fricasseed Chicken, Brown from Child, 54)

(Note that often cooked poultry  in the 18th century was meant to be served as white as possible (see turkey blog) This recipe browns the chicken pieces first. It is followed by a recipe called fricasseed chicken, white.)

A modern fricassee (based on fricasseed chicken, brown)
(Note that often cooked poultry  in the 18th century was meant to be served as white as possible (see turkey blog) This recipe browns the chicken pieces first. It is followed by a recipe called fricasseed chicken, white.)

1 chicken or about 8 pieces of chicken
1 onion
About 3 T. butter
About ½ c. flour
1 t. Salt
½ t. Pepper
1 t. Crushed marjoram
2 t. Crushed sage

Cut up a chicken into serving size pieces (legs, thighs, wings, etc.) Wash and dredge the chicken in a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper. Fry them in butter along with 1 chopped onion.
When the chicken is browned, remove it. Add 2 cups of water or broth to the pan, along with marjoram and sage. Bring to a boil. Mix 2 T. of the flour left from dredging with 2 T. water to make a roue. Add the roue to the pan, stirring constantly. Boil 1-2 minutes. Turn the heat down to simmer. Put the browned chicken back in the pan and simmer 20-30 minutes.

Recipes for Fricassee can be found in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (pages 40 and 44) and in The American Frugal Housewife p. 54, among other cookbooks.

Child, Lydia Marie. The American Frugal Housewife. Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy. 12th Edition. Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Co. 1833. (First published 1828)

—–. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats. (A Family Manuscript, Hand written circa 17th century. Transcribed and annotated by Karen Hess, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)

It’s a really good thing I’m not a farmer.

If I were, I’d starve.  

However, I do dabble a bit in gardening, and I love experimenting. So a few years ago, I decided to grow wheat. After all, I bake all my own bread from scratch. Why not try to make a loaf really from scratch–starting with wheat seeds? 

Besides the appeal of trying something new, I had acquired a small packet, about a tablespoon, of einkorn wheat seeds from a gardening program I attended. Einkorn is an ancient grain, thus even more appealing to my sense of food adventure. I couldn’t let such bounty go to waste.

The first step, preparing the ground and planting the seeds was fairly easy. I took out all the weeds and grass shoots from a 6 x10’ patch of ground in our garden, and placed the seeds neatly in 3 rows. The planting instructions said this was winter wheat, so I planted in the fall, and let it rest over winter. I have to admit I wondered if mice, rabbits, or birds would find all the seeds before they were covered in snow, but I needn’t have worried. 

Come spring, tiny green shoots poked up through the dirt in all my rows. Though heartening, this was the beginning of my trouble. Not only did shoots pop up in the rows, but all over the entire patch. At that point, I realized I didn’t actually know what wheat looks like while growing. My knowledge of wheat stemmed mostly from childhood. We had a slender grass-like weed in the backyard in California. This weed developed a lovely, pale green head of seed kernels. My sisters and I called it miniature wheat, because it grew only about 8 “ high. We loved to harvest it and feed it to our dolls and Breyer model horses.( Once, we even tried cooking and eating it ourselves, but that was not worth trying a second time.) In any case, I knew enough to recognize my memories of miniature wheat weren’t an adequate guide. I looked up wheat pictures on the internet, but only found mature wheat. Since I couldn’t tell what was weed and what was wheat among the shoots, I didn’t pull up anything. By the time I actually could tell what was wheat and what wasn’t, the weeds were nearly as tall as the wheat. I worried that I would pull up the wheat along with the weeds. I did the best I could, and the wheat did the best it could under the circumstances.

Eventually, I could see it was getting close to harvest time. The wheat was starting to look rather golden, like the pictures of wheat fields I’d seen. I figured I’d gather it in just a few more days.

Unfortunately, the local birds knew more about wheat than I did. They did their own harvesting before I got there. I did manage to glean a bit of wheat from what the birds left behind. My total harvest: about 2 tablespoons of wheat, perhaps twice the amount that I had sown.  

Obviously this wasn’t enough to make a loaf of bread, but I’m stubborn. I wanted to make at least a little flour. However,  that presented another challenge. I don’t have a threshing floor or a flail to beat the wheat and remove the hulls. I tried crushing it with a mortar and pestle, without success. The seeds just rolled around. Finally, I tried a rolling pin. That worked nicely to crush the hull, but it also crushed the kernel.  I feared winnowing it in a traditional way (tossing the threshed grain into the air and letting the chaff blow away) would lose everything. Instead I sifted the crushed wheat. The result was just over a teaspoon of very fine flour. (No need to grind this wheat- the rolling pin took care of that.)

What to do with one teaspoon of flour? Well, this spring we found only one morel mushroom. There was just enough flour to sprinkle on the mushroom and fry it. My husband and I each had two delicious bites. 

Maybe I should leave both the farming and the foraging to those who know how to do it.

This post starts with a fair warning: I don’t like beans. With the notable exception of various kinds of green beans (that is, beans with minimal seeds and edible pods), I dislike all types of the actual bean seeds. Dislike is perhaps too mild a word. My mother’s famous bean soup, relished by all other members of my family, always made me gag. I know that beans are nutritious, a valuable source of vegetable protein, and fairly easy to grow. They are eaten with gusto in many parts of the world. The fact remains, however, that in spite of years of trying to learn to like them, I still don’t like beans.

So, you might reasonably ask, why write a blog post about beans? The answer is a bit complicated. Due to vacation travels, benign neglect of the garden, and a misunderstanding, (I thought the beans we planted were green beans) I ended up with a good quantity of beautiful Heritage Calypso Beans. It turns out I hate wasting food even more than I hate beans. So I decided to find a way to cook these beans and enjoy eating them.

Easier said than done. I started by reading up on beans. Beans have been cultivated for thousands of years in both the Old and New Worlds. Broad beans, also called fava beans, were known in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The common bean originated in the Americas. Suffice it to say, beans have enjoyed world-wide popularity since ancient times.

With this information in mind, I searched my older cookbooks for bean recipes. Most of the Colonial-era cookbooks suggested cooking beans with pork or bacon. Older, medieval-era books had more variety in method and seasoning.

I settled on three methods of cooking the beans:

1.To Dress Beans and Bacon (18th century)

Mary Randolph suggests using tender, fresh beans (the seed portion), picked in the morning. These are to be boiled with a flitch of bacon, and served with butter. (Randolph p.106-107)

 Child recommends cooking beans with pork, but calls for soaking the beans overnight, and seasoning the pork and beans with pepper. (Child p.51)

Glasse also pairs beans with pork, but insists the two be boiled separately, then served together with butter and parsley, and topped with toasted bread crumbs. (Glasse, p.35-36)

My version: Colonial Pork and Beans

Soak 2 cups fresh Calypso beans overnight. (This step is probably not necessary with fresh beans.)

Boil the beans for 45 minutes, until they are soft.

Meanwhile, roast a pork tenderloin or pork tenderloin crusted with bacon for 1-1½ hours (depending on size)(Note- all the colonial recipes called for boiling the chunk of bacon or pork, but I felt that roasting the meat would produce a better flavor.)

Drain the beans. Add butter and salt to taste. Serve them in a dish with the pork.

The result: This dish was very nice to look at, but the beans still tasted like beans to me. I could eat them if the flavor was disguised with enough of the pork. My daughter, who likes beans, thought the beans were fairly bland this way, and suggested they would be better if the beans and pork or bacon were cooked together.

2. For to make drawen benes (14th century)

“Take benes and seethe hem, and grynde hem in a morter, and drawe hem vp with gode broth; & do oynouns in the broth grete mynced, & do therto; and colour it with saffroun, and serue it forth.” (Curye on Inglysch, p. 98)

My version: Medieval Bean Dip

This is very much like a modern bean dip. 

Take 1//2 c. Calypso beans, boiled until they are soft. Mash them well. Simmer ¼ c. chopped onion and a pinch of saffron in 3 T. beef broth. Add the broth mixture to the bean mixture. Season to taste.

The result: This is also a very bland dish with a strong bean flavor.

3. For to make a potage  (14th century)

“Tak wite benes & seth hem in water, & bray the benys in a morter al to nought; & lat them sethe in almande mylk & do therein wyn & hony, & seth reysouns in wyn & do therto & after dresse yt forth.” (Curye on Inglysch, p. 77-78)

My version: A Sweet Bean Soup

A potage is a soup, so I had serious doubts about this recipe, remembering my experience with my mother’s bean soup. However, this recipe is quite different from any other bean recipe, so I was willing to try it.

Boil ½ c. Calypso beans until they are soft. Mash them. Stir in 1/2 c. almond milk. Soak ½ c. raisins in ½ c. red wine for 10 minutes. Mix the wine and raisins into the bean and milk mixture. Add !/4 c. honey. Heat and serve.

The result: In this recipe, the sweetness of the honey and raisins completely masked the bean flavor, and I actually liked the dish. Unfortunately, no one else did. 

In the end, my experiment with Calypso beans was only partially successful. Although at least one person liked each of the three dishes, no one begged for seconds. I’m happy to say, none of the beans were wasted. 

But next year, I think I’ll plant green beans.

Sources:
Child, Lydia Marie. The American Frugal Housewife. Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy. 12th Edition. Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Co. 1833. (First published 1828)

Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (Including the "Forme of Cury") Constance B. Heiatt (Editor), and Sharon Butler (Editor). Oxford University Press; 1st Edition edition, 1985.

Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy: Excelling any Thing of the Kind ever yet published. Alexandria: Cottom and Stewart. 1805. (First Edition publishing in London, 1747. This edition reprint of 1st American Edition, 1805, by Applewood Books, 1997).

Randolph, Mary. The Virginia Housewife Or, Methodical Cook. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1860. (Facsimile by Dover Publications, 1993, with introduction by Janice Bluestein Longone).

Of all the lovely vegetables that pop up in the spring, my favorite is sparrow grass, more commonly known now as asparagus. This delightful vegetable has been popular since ancient times, appearing in the first known cookbook  (Apicus’s De Re Coquinaria Book III, 3rd Century BCE). It was undoubtedly cultivated even earlier, perhaps even as early as 2000 BCE in Egypt, where asparagus seeds have been found in tombs.

Asparagus was popular  in the Ancient Mediterranean world. Both Greek and Arab writers claimed it was an aphrodisiac, possibly due to the shape. Romans dried it, froze it, cooked it, and ate it fresh, claiming the shoots were good for the digestion. For a time in the late middle ages, asparagus was considered a delicacy, eaten primarily by royalty. However, common people enjoyed it too. In 1677, Samuel Pepys wrote that he had purchased a bundle of sparrow grass from the market in Fenchurch Street, London, for 1s 6d*. (Brunning). Nearly all of my period cookbook (reprints and facsimiles from the 18th and 19th centuries) offer recipes for asparagus.

In addition to the delicious taste, asparagus is also known as a diuretic. Less appealing is the effect asparagus has on the urine of many, but not all eaters. Ben Franklin wrote about the ‘disagreeable odor’ of urine after consumption.

Prior to the Norman Invasion in 1066 CE (Old English) what we know as asparagus, was called eorthnafela (earth navel). The name ‘asparagus’ is Latin, coming from Greek ‘aspharagos’, possibly deriving from the Persian word, ‘asparag’, meaning ‘shoot’. By the14th century (Middle English) it was called asperages. Sometimes, people assumed that ‘asperages’ was plural, and left off the ‘s’ for the singular form, calling a single green spear  ‘aspergy’. By the 16th century (Early Modern English) the word had morphed into ‘sperach’ or ‘sperage’. Around this same time, educated writers went back to the Latin form, asparagus.’ but common folk began pronouncing it ‘sparrow grass’, since that is what it sounds like, and the tall, slender shoots are somewhat grass-like. Though the edible shoots of asparagus do indeed look like some grasess, it turns out that this plant is actually a distant cousin of leeks and onions. Surprisingly, the Latin name won out in the end, so that now ‘asparagus’ is the most common word for this vegetable.

The following recipe is one of many similar examples for cooking asparagus in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Asparagus

Set a stew-pan with plenty of water on the fire, sprinkle a handful of salt in it, let it boil, and skim it, then put in the asparagus prepared thus: scrape all the stalks till they are perfectly clean; throw them into a pan of cold water as you scrape them; when they are all done, tie them in little bundles, of a quarter of a hundred each, with bass,* if you can get it, or tape*; cut off the stalks at the bottom, that they may be all of a length; when they are tender at the stalk, which will be in from twenty to thirty minutes, they are done enough. Great care must be taken to watch the exact time of their becoming tender; take them just at that instant, and they will have their true flavour and colour; a minute or two more boiling destroys both. While the asparagus is boiling, toast a slice of a loaf of bread, about a half an inch thick; brown it delicately on both sides; dip it lightly in the liquor the asparagus was boiled in, and lay it in the middle of a dish; pour some melted butter on the toast, and lay the asparagus upon it; let it project beyond the asparagus that the company may see there is a toast. Do not pour butter over them, but send some in a boat. (Randolph, 100-101)

This recipe seems unnecessarily complicated for the modern cook. Scraping the asparagus may be more useful with garden fresh asparagus, when the little leaves on the stalks are more likely to harbor dirt. Hannah Glasse suggests scraping the stalks so that they look white (35), though she is undoubtedly talking about the white variety of asparagus. In any case, I see no need to scrape well-washed stalks, as scraping makes no real difference in taste, color, or texture.

Likewise, tying the stalks in a bundle seems unnecessary. Perhaps the purpose is to make a neater, nicer-looking vegetable for serving. I boiled the asparagus as suggested, but normally I prefer steaming it in the microwave, a method obviously unknown to Colonial cooks. Again, the taste is the same, but it is easier to make sure the asparagus is crisp-tender, not over-cooked.  Hannah Glasse reiterates the idea that all ‘garden things’ should be cooked delicately:

Directions concerning Garden Things.                                                                                             Most people spoil garden things by over-boiling them. All things that are green should have a little crispness, for it they are over-boiled, they neither have any sweetness or beauty. (Glasse, 35)

Finally, modern consumers are not likely to enjoy slightly soggy toast as a base for the asparagus. Although I found the combination surprisingly tasty, I think toasted bread crumbs as a garnish will prove more palatable to people today.  Here then is a modernized version of asparagus which our forebears would recognize and enjoy as much as we do.

Wash 1 bunch of asparagus thoroughly. Trim the ends so the spears are all the same length. Place in a microwavable dish with a little water and a ¼ t. salt. Cover and microwave on high for 5 minutes. (Microwaves vary so you might check for tenderness after 3 minutes, adding more time as necessary.) Toast some whole wheat bread. Butter it and crumble it.  Lay the asparagus on a dish. Strew the bread crumbs over it, and serve.

___________

Notes:

* 1s 6d (One schilling, six pence) was about a day’s wages for a skilled tradesman in 1670 or almost $11.00 in today’s money.) See National Archives Currency Converter for  more information. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result

** ‘bass’ is a type of straw of fiber used for tying, and tape is atrip of cloth for the same purpose. Surgical tape, the first adhesive-backed fabric strip, was invented in 1845)

____________

Brunning, Pam. “Asparagus: Liliaceae-Asparagacease.” Food and Wine. June 2010.page 6-7.

Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy: Excelling any Thing of the Kind ever yet published. Alexandria: Cottom and Stewart. 1805. (First Edition publishing in London, 1747. This edition reprint of 1st American Edition, 1805, by Applewood Books, 1997).

Randolph, Mary. The Virginia Housewife Or, Methodical Cook. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1860. (Facsimile by Dover Publications, 1993, with introduction by Janice Bluestein Longone.)