Talk:Fricassee

(Untitled)
What is being described as "cajun fricassee" is actually chicken CREOLE. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrbentley (talk • contribs) 13:30, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

not too lazy to make the article, but too lazy to make it properly -bigtrick

External Link removed
Removed the following external link: Fricassée. Seems the BBC removed its food glossary and the link was not so much broken as obsolete. I did not add another, though there are a number of possibilities, chiefly because it seems redundant to link the WP description of fricassee to another description of fricassee. Since that was the only link, I also removed the header. Richigi (talk) 21:15, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Complete revision
Complete rewrite of previous entry. To describe fricassee simply as a "French stew" is insufficient, and not entirely correct. This rewrite attempts to distinguish fricassee, as a dish and a method, from stew; or at the least, to show what particular manner of stew it is. Also, sources have been added, as well as a little detail on history.

Reference to a "Greek fricassee" which does not fit the method has not been re-included, nor has a reference to a Cajun fricassee which is discussed above as erroneous.Richigi (talk) 02:47, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Since I did such a major revision, I'm pasting the former text (2 paragraphs) below.
 * (Fricassee) is any stewed dish typically made with poultry, although other types of white meat can be substituted. It is cut into pieces and then stewed in gravy, which is then thickened with butter and cream or milk (see white gravy). It often includes other ingredients and vegetables. Greek fricassée is often made with pork or lamb and usually contains either wild green herbs or lettuce, or both; the gravy is thickened with beaten eggs or avgolemono before serving, as in a variant of magiritsa (Easter soup).


 * A Cajun fricassee is any type of meat or seafood stewed in a gravy made with a dark roux, usually the color of milk chocolate. As in most Cajun dishes, it also contains onions, bell peppers, celery, and garlic, and is served over rice.

If anyone sees in the above text something that should be salvaged, by all means do so. For me it was just easier to start from scratch since the topic is so short. Now that the article includes reliable (I trust) references, I took the liberty of removing the "refimprove" tag. Richigi (talk) 16:29, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Poultry is meat
Reverted a good faith edit with the claim that poultry is not meat. According to the dictionary (here is a link to merriam-webster, but pick any one), poultry is domesticated birds raised for eggs or meat. Open to discussion to obtain consensus, if you like. Richigi (talk) 01:32, 25 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Speaking of confusion, LARD (see section on Jewish cuisine) is NOT a 'dairy' fat. Lard is rendered, clarified animal fat - source unspecified; 'tallow' almost always comes from beef fat and is often recommended as a lard substitute for kosher cooks. (I'm not Jewish but I think I have this right.) 'Lardons' are cubes of fatty smoked bacon, sometimes identified as 'lard' in European cooking.
 * What dairy fats - apart from butter - are actually used for browning? I can't think of any. Margarines ('oleo') and olive/other cooking oils are all plant derived.
 * I'm completely new to this editing thing so I'm hoping someone else will make the correction. 31.54.81.178 (talk) 09:51, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Images
The article discribes fricassee as "a method of cooking meat in which the meat is cut up, sautéed, and braised, and served with its sauce, traditionally a white sauce." (Presumably that doesn't actually mean white sauce, although there may be similarities). Going by this definition, I would say that the first two images are not of Fricassees. The first one looks like the chicken has simply been boiled and the second one looks like mushroom risotto with lobster and monkfish on top. I suppose, depending on how the lobster and monkfish have been cooked, that may technically fit the deffinition given, but it doesn't fit the image that the definition produces in my mind (that probably counts as WP:OR though). Could we take those two images down and maybe find some more appropriate ones? Will Bradshaw (talk) 21:23, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll go along with you that they are not images that exemplify the dish, although I think that they are probably both images of fricasseed food. There's a category on Commons for fricassee, but there's not much quality there. I wonder, does this small article really need 3 images?  Let's just take away two.  But then the remaining image still isn't great quality.  I'll paste a request image template and see if we get anything. Richigi (talk) 22:20, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I've added some more photos of fricassee from Flickr to Commons:Category:Fricassée. Maybe some of them will be useful. —Granger (talk · contribs) 22:50, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Fricassee is French
I reverted a good faith edit which added "French" to the description in the lead. The antiquity of this method and its ubiquity even centuries ago makes such a claim problematic and misleading. The name "fricassee" is likely of French origin, but that is discussed in the etymology section. As a method, it appears early on in Le Viandier, which is French, but in all likelihood pre-dates that work (arguments have been made for fricassee recipes in Apicius). I'd say a claim of nationality would be most difficult to establish without attracting many arguments. The claim might, perhaps, be worded less categorically; fricassee undoubtedly has strong French associations. Richigi (talk) 14:57, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Fricasse, despite being described in a 14th century medieval cookbook is actually 'a good old fashioned American dish'? Is there no limit to American IP theft - or whining that other countries steal theirs? 31.54.81.178 (talk) 09:55, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Pollo en Fricasé
"Popular in the Caribbean islands, especially Puerto Rico and Cuba, Pollo en Fricase is really just a fancy name for chicken casserole." --http://www.thecreativepot.net/2011/02/pollo-en-fricase.html

"Puerto Rican cuisine was developed from the early cooking traditions of the Taíno Indians, Europeans and Africans. European influence was known for their complex stews (chicken fricassée) and rice (paella rice) cooked in pots.   Specifically, the French influence in Puerto Rico led to the creation of the chicken fricassée." --http://aidaskitchenboricua.com/chicken-fricassee-pollo-en-fricase/

NoToleranceForIntolerance (talk) 14:31, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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Jamaica
In Jamaica, chicken fricassee has long been an alternate name for Brown stew chicken. Brown stew chicken seems to be winning but back in the 60s, it seems to be all chicken fricassee. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.37.101.123 (talk) 06:08, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

White sauce.
Every variant seems to be a brown sauce variant with routes Spain or the south of France. and the white sauce is not a classic french white sauce. I propose that the main definition be changed to reflect this. "A fried chicken cooked in typically, a dairy or tomato-based sauce." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.37.101.123 (talk) 06:17, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Category:Antebellum cuisine
I removed the category Antebellum cuisine from this article, with the comment "Nothing particularly "antebellum" about it. Should we also categorize it as "Ancien régime cooking"?!". Spudlace reverted, saying "there are reliable sources for this in the article".

All I see in the article is that Fricassees are documented in France, England, the US, the Spanish Caribbean, and California (1898) from the 16th century to the present. In the US, Abraham Lincoln is said to have liked it, and a John Burroughs provides a recipe. By the way, is it in fact John Burroughs as linked who lived 1837-1921 and is thus postbellum? Or is it Mrs. John Burroughs in 1743, who would normally be considered pre-revolutionary rather than antebellum? I don't dispute that fricassee was eaten in the US before the Civil War. But are we going to add categories for every time and place that a food was eaten? How about the French Ancien Regime? How about Medieval France?Surely it was eaten there and then. How about modern Belgium? It is clearly eaten in all these times and places. It is not reasonable to attach a category to every food for all the times and places where it has been eaten.

In fact, I question the category "antebellum cuisine". The Cuisine of Antebellum America article talks about various trends in that period, and various foods eaten in that period, but doesn't identify any specific foods as "antebellum foods". --Macrakis (talk) 02:59, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * "I ate this dish at my friend's house in Japan" would not be a good reason to add a category. "My mom is Polish-French and she makes this dish all the time" would not be a good reason to add it to Polish cuisine. The categories I added are based on what is sourced in the article. I don't know what the French Ancien Regime is but if you wanted to add that you would need to add a reliable source for it to the article. Medieval french is usually covered by medieval cuisine. Spudlace (talk) 03:28, 17 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Re "I don't know what the French Ancien Regime is", check out Ancien Régime. It was the period during which the word fricassée was introduced, though there were surely fricassées before that. You might want to read Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past and Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste.
 * I still don't see the evidence in this article that this is particularly antebellum. Abraham Lincoln liked it, apparently while he was President (so not antebellum). The cited source for Martha Washington also mentions a 1727 recipe and a 1770-1819 recipe (the only one in the right period) and says that fricassee "dates back to at least the late Middle Ages".
 * I would strongly recommend that you review the policy on WP:SYNTH. --Macrakis (talk) 20:20, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * What is WP:SYNTH? The sources are easy to find. Here is another one . And another one . Spudlace (talk) 21:17, 17 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Those are fine sources for the existence of the dish at various times. They are not sources for fricassee being specifically "antebellum cuisine". What is WP:SYNTH is taking a simple mention of a dish in a certain period to be evidence that it is typical or characteristic of that period. We could probably find a mention of fricassee in every quarter-century for the past 300 years in America, Britain, and France. That doesn't mean that we can categorize it as "British Victorian cuisine" or "American post-war cuisine" or whatever. --Macrakis (talk) 02:03, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Using Google nGrams, we can in fact see that fricassee was widely used in the US, Britain, and France quite consistently starting before 1700 in France, becoming popular in the UK in about 1770, and in the US in about 1760. The US data is a little wonky because there's a spike in 1781, so it's easier to read the results starting in 1790: This graph shows that fricasse was pretty consistently popular (in books) from about 1800 to 1900 -- if anything, growing more popular after the Civil War -- then dropped off a bit from 1920 to now. So there doesn't seem to be anything specifically "antebellum" about it. --Macrakis (talk) 19:53, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I may even agree with the need for a more general category name, like "Historical American foods", and redirecting Antebellum cuisine. There is overlap with the Gilded age, but there are also some changes that scholars may have different views about whether those changes are significant. The restaurant scene becomes more established, wealth reaches new levels, the standard dishes become more elaborate, and around 1890 we have even deeper changes as the styles and patterns of eating change for different social classes in America who are mostly excluded from this in the early history. I chose "Antebellum cuisine" because the "early American cuisine" was even worse; I didn't know what the end point for it should be. I'm open to discussing what the category should be named, but I would have preferred one discussion on the category talk page instead of removing all the articles from the category, because we do need some category for historical American foods, even if it isn't called "Antebellum" Spudlace (talk) 21:06, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Good idea to continue discussion on the Category talk:Antebellum cuisine page. I will do that. --Macrakis (talk) 18:29, 20 September 2020 (UTC)