Home › The Principles of Cookery › CAPON (a la Casserole)
CAPON (a la Casserole)
Take one large capon and lard its breast (see LARD, To). Chop up a half terrine of pate de foie gras with three hard-boiled eggs, and make it into a forcemeat with three slices of fat bacon minced, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, a pinch of tarragon, the yolk of a raw egg, pepper and salt. Stuff the bird with this, and stew it gently in a closely-covered earthen-ware dish or casserole. Serve with a rich white sauce, flavoured with oysters or mushrooms. Probable cost, 6s.
A late-Victorian company dish built around two things a modern shopper has to substitute: a capon and a terrine of foie gras. Everything else is straightforward pot-roasting.
- "A la casserole" means the potHere a closely covered earthenware dish for gentle stewing, not a baked dish of layers. A 5- to 6-quart Dutch oven with a tight lid is a workable modern equivalent, and a low oven of about 325F is easier to control than a low flame, though the book itself specifies no oven temperature.
- The birdA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh; a few specialist butchers still sell them at 6-8 lb. Failing that, use a 4-5 lb roasting chicken and expect it to need less time.
- Half a terrine of foie grasThe quantity is genuinely ambiguous, since terrines were sold in several sizes. Judge by the bird: about 6-8 oz of pate for a 5 lb chicken gives a forcemeat you can actually stuff, and more than that will simply render out.
- LardingThreading strips of pork back fat through the breast with a larding needle is what keeps a lean capon breast from drying over a long stew. A modern shortcut is to lay thin sheets of back fat or unsmoked streaky bacon across the breast and tie them on, removing them near the end.
- Temperature is the hinge"Stew it gently" means a bare simmer around the bird, not a boil; foie gras above a hard simmer melts to grease and the breast toughens. Keep it at about 180-190F, or the oven at 325F. The recipe specifies no liquid, trusting the closed pot; adding a little stock or white wine so it never runs dry is a modern precaution.
- DonenessBecause the cavity is packed with a rich forcemeat containing a raw yolk, cook to temperature rather than time: 165F in the centre of the stuffing as well as in the thigh. A 5 lb chicken takes roughly 1 1/2 hours, a large capon closer to 2 1/4.
- Oysters in the sauceAdd shucked oysters to the finished white sauce off the heat and give them a minute or two, just until the edges ruffle. Simmered any longer they shrink and turn rubbery. Sliced mushrooms, by contrast, want five minutes' cooking before they go in.
- Yield and costA stuffed capon of this size serves six to eight generously. The "probable cost, 6s." is a period price note, not a modern guide -- six shillings was a substantial outlay for a single dish in late-Victorian terms, which tells you this was dinner-party food.
Cassell's places this among a run of capon dishes because the capon was long a prized bird for an occasion: castration produced a heavier, fatter, more tender carcass than a cockerel, and both English and French cookery ranked it highly among poultry. The a la casserole title reflects the French-influenced entrees common in British cookbooks of the period, and the foie gras stuffing shows how far tinned and potted luxuries had travelled by the later nineteenth century -- a terrine could be bought at a good London grocer's and used, as here, as a convenience ingredient rather than a delicacy served on its own. The oyster-flavoured white sauce is more distinctly British: oysters were cheap and plentiful enough for much of the nineteenth century to be treated as a seasoning for poultry and beef rather than a splurge, a habit that faded as English oyster beds declined and prices rose.