It Was a Typical Fricassee Sunday Morning in Vincennes, the Old

t was a typical fricassee Sunday morning in Vincennes, the old French the mountain of boiled chickens piled on town on the banks of the Wabash River. In Highland Park’s tin-roofed the long, formica-topped harvest tables. Talk of tornadoes, bingos, high school pavilion, intent men in red aprons tended ten enormous kettles, each sports, politics, and weddings commingled holdingI fifty to sixty gallons of roiling brown soup. As the gas burners hissed with a little grousing about the church and flared, the cooks kept careful watch over their precious fare. The metal that was not decorated “much at all.” With stirrers endlessly whirled, keeping the thick stew from scorching. Though its cheerful crew, the brightly lit pavilion in the darkened park looked like a happy only 9 a.m. on a white-hot southern Indiana summer day, a line of people ship sailing through calm seas. Deboning already snaked toward the kitchen. An ancient swamp-cooler fan blew chilly advice went down the line to the novices: gales in one side of the open shelter, only to be reduced to a tepid breeze by “No system to it— try not to burn your the other. In the welcoming shade of the canopy, servers ladled rich porridge fingers and pick out the bones.” As the into bowls, pots, and jars at a steady clip, scarcely pausing to exchange the workers dealt with the meat, other cooks mixed the chicken and beef stocks to obligatory pleasantries. Everyone had fricassee on their minds. gether, adding a big dollop of pork stock. “Not too much,” Yochum confided, “too Unlike the mild chicken and duck Creole heritage, aficionados considered its fatty.” A crew of men started grinding the versions of modern French fricassees, fricassee watery and bland. Saint John’s, meat into battered galvanized washtubs. A Vincennes fricassee is a sultry dish, velvety the mid-nineteenth-century German im young boy pawed through the bone box, with beef and chicken cooked overnight, migrants’ church, served Vincennes’s most looking for wishbones. smoky with bacon, perked with black acclaimed fricassee. For more than four Then the vegetables went through the pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and the decades it was prepared under the watch grinder. First in was the three hundred tang o f lemon. Remnant bits o f onions, ful eye o f fricassee master Alois Yochum. pounds of onions that volunteers had carrots, corn, peas, and potatoes float in “I’m the head of it, I guess,” he said when peeled and quartered. “It hurts,” said a the unctuous stew. Kissing cousins to asked his title. A white-haired Hoosier in tall girl in a red t-shirt and braces, tears Burgoo, Brunswick stew, and the chowders coveralls and a red baseball cap, Yochum streaming down her red face as she peeled o f southern Illinois, fricassee is an archaic kept his fricassee secrets close to the vest, the last bag. Then six hundred pounds of culinary link to the Creole trading-post telling no one the exact recipe. “I worked potatoes, bundles of celery stalks, and a days that began in Vincennes in the 1720s. with it,” he said conspiratorially, glancing forest o f parsley were added. Gallon cans Vincennes was one of the French Empire’s around with hawk eyes. A fellow worker o f cubed carrots, peas, and creamed corn most remote American outposts, the end called out, “He’s had three open-heart sur went in the vats later. o f the line for generations of voyageurs geries, but won’t tell anyone. We’re hoping There was a Gallo-Teutonic order to paddling canoes and bateaux down from it’s in his will.” the whole thing. The concrete floor was Quebec for the region’s furs. The town’s Saint John’s fricassee started the day wet with hosed water as the cleanup crew French heritage lives on in family histo before the event when dozens of parish tidied up behind the relentless chicken ries, the old French cemetery, crazy-quilt volunteers began wrestling with 148 fresh disassemblers and grinding crew. Yochum French land-grant survey lines, the George chickens, 170 pounds of beef, and 60 and his relatives looked after the pots, now Rogers Clark Memorial that commemo pounds of bacon. “You’ve got to use that churning with ingredients. Yochum stalked rates his Creole-assisted Revolutionary good jowl bacon,” Yochum noted, as the the line o f kettles like an alchemist over his War victory, and the enticing smells of volunteers tossed in mahogany-colored cauldrons, adding a handful of salt there, fricassee. meat the size of anthracite chunks. The a long pour of black pepper there, ground Vincennes Catholic parishes have long meats went into separate steaming kettles lemons, tomato juice, and two gallons of used fricassee for church fund-raisers. for a long boil. Worcestershire sauce. The bite o f pepper Saint Francis Xavier Parish, with its Old Come nightfall, someone flicked on filled the cool night air. Cathedral church adjacent to the Clark the bare electric lightbulbs hanging from Through the night, parish men memorial, was the traditional parish for the rusting corrugated ceiling. Chatting watched the steaming kettles, some Vincennes’s French. But in spite o f its women and joshing men began deboning considering long-necked beers to be a TRACES | Spring 2009 27.

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