"[1] The main ingredients consist of potatoes, onions, and whatever meat was available, cooked in a stew and topped with dumplings.

This accounts for the long cooking time, as an older chicken would have had tougher meat.

Fricot a la belette was one term for this, which means "weasel stew".

In the opposite vein, Prince Edward Island Acadians use the term fricot a la bazette which means "stupid cook's stew", implying that the meat was forgotten.

The following century, it had evolved to mean "meat stew", and later still it became used to refer to prepared food.