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Capon Cream
Take all the meat from the remains of a boiled or roast capon; pound it in a mortar, and season with pepper and salt; add a beaten egg, and rub all through a sieve. Add half a gill of cream, and the white of an egg, and mix. Put the mixture into small well-buttered moulds, cover over with buttered paper, and steam gently for twenty minutes. Turn out carefully, and pour over each a little good white sauce.
A Victorian way of using up the last of a roast bird: a small savoury custard, closer to a quenelle or a mousseline than to anything called "cream" today. The whole thing hinges on the mixture being smooth and on the steam staying gentle.
- Half a gillIn imperial measure a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2.5 fl oz (roughly 70 ml); by the US gill of 4 fl oz it would be 1/4 cup (about 60 ml). Take it as a starting point rather than a fixed figure — the amount of meat from "the remains of a capon" is unknowable, and the mixture wants the consistency of a thick batter that just falls from the spoon.
- CaponA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh, and it is not sold in most supermarkets. The leftovers of a 4–5 lb roast chicken do the same job; a mix of light and dark meat gives more flavour than breast alone.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor replaces the pounding in seconds. The sieving is not optional decoration — pushing the paste through a fine sieve or drum sieve is what removes sinew and gives the finished cream its texture. Work it through with a stiff plastic scraper.
- Gentle steam is the pointEgg-set mixtures curdle and weep if the water boils hard. Keep the water at a bare tremble, well below the moulds, and lift the lid a crack if it starts to rattle. Twenty minutes is right for dariole moulds of about 4 fl oz; a larger mould needs longer.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to size does the job, buttered on the underside so it lifts away cleanly. It keeps condensation off the surface, which would otherwise pit the custard.
- Judging it doneThe centre should feel set but yielding, and a skewer come out clean; around 165°F/74°C at the middle. The meat is already cooked, so this is purely about setting the egg.
- White sauceA plain béchamel will do, but a velouté made with chicken stock and finished with a spoon of cream suits it far better. Keep it thin enough to coat and pool, not to sit on top.
- YieldThe meat from one bird's leftovers fills roughly six to eight small moulds — a light first course, or a supper dish with something green alongside.
Nineteenth-century English cookery took the French mousseline — pounded meat or fish bound with egg and cream, sieved smooth, then poached or steamed in moulds — and applied it to yesterday's roast, since a large bird fed a household for days. The word "cream" here describes the texture and the binding, not a dessert. Capons were a standard market bird in Britain through the Victorian period and into the twentieth century, valued for size and fat; caponising has since become rare in Britain, which is why the name now reads as archaic.