Fricassée a French term which long ago passed into English, at first meaning ‘any meat fried in a panne’, as Cotgrave (1611) succinctly put it. Although another 17th-century source declared it to mean ‘varieties of Meat boiled together in a Broth’, the term usually indicated frying (often small pieces, later to be enveloped in a thickened sauce) up to fairly recent times, when it began to fall into disuse. In France it is now used particularly of dishes based on white meat (chicken or veal) and clad in a creamy sauce.
