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Capon, Roasted, with Cream Stuffing
Truss a capon for roasting. Boil the liver, and mince it as finely as possible. Pour a little cream over a cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Let them soak for half an hour. Shred finely four ounces of suet, a tea-spoonful of scalded parsley, and four or five button mushrooms cut small and fried. Mix these well together with a little pepper and salt, and add the yolks of two eggs. Stuff the capon with the mixture, and roast it before a clear fire. Serve with sauce flavoured with chopped gherkins. Time to roast, one hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. to 4s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A late-Victorian roast bird with a rich, panada-style forcemeat. The recipe assumes a spit before an open fire and a bird larger than most supermarkets carry, so both the vessel and the timing need translating.
- The capon itselfA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh; capons are no longer generally produced in Britain, surgical caponising having been prohibited. A good free-range roasting chicken of 4-5 lb stands in directly.
- Roast before a clear fireThis means spit-roasting in front of vertical radiant heat with a dripping pan beneath, not oven cooking. In an oven, roast at 400F, basting, and count on rather more than the stated hour for a 4-5 lb bird.
- The hour is too shortAn hour suits a small bird turning close to a fierce fire. Cook to a thermometer instead: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, and the same in the centre of the stuffing, which is the part most likely to lag.
- Stuffing safetyThe forcemeat is bound with raw egg yolk and packed inside the bird (the liver is boiled first). Either check its internal temperature directly, or bake it separately in a dish and serve alongside, which also gives a better-browned result.
- SuetFour ounces of shredded beef suet is the binding fat. Packet shredded suet works; fresh suet from a butcher should be stripped of membrane and grated frozen. Cold grated butter is a workable substitute, though the texture is softer.
- Scalded parsleyParsley plunged briefly into boiling water and drained, which fixes the colour and takes off the raw edge. A teaspoonful means chopped, not whole leaves.
- Crumbs and creamA cupful of fine dry crumbs with "a little cream" is vague. Add cream a spoonful at a time until the crumbs are moist and clump when pressed but are not wet; roughly 3-4 tablespoons for a cup of crumbs.
- The gherkin sauceThe base is unspecified; a plain brown gravy or veloute made from the pan drippings suits, finished with finely chopped gherkins off the heat so they keep their bite. Add them at the last moment or the vinegar dulls.
- Cost and yield2s. 6d. to 4s. was a substantial outlay for one dish in the 1890s, which tells you the capon was a special-occasion bird. Four to five servings is accurate for a 4-5 lb chicken with stuffing.
Capons were a fixture of European feast cookery for centuries: caponising a young cockerel halted the development of tough, stringy muscle and produced a fatter, more tender bird that also grew larger than an uncastrated one. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared, the capon was already an expensive item bought from a poulterer rather than raised at home. The stuffing here is a classic English forcemeat of the period, built on a bread panada slackened with cream and enriched with suet, liver and egg yolk; the fried button mushrooms and the gherkin-sharpened sauce show the French influence that ran through Victorian upper-middle-class cooking. Spit-roasting before a clear fire, specified rather than baking, was still considered the superior method for poultry, and cookery writers of the era were often explicit that an oven-cooked bird was a lesser thing.