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Capon, Roasted, with Truffles
Clean, wash, and peel some truffles, and cut them in slices about a quarter of an inch thick; fry them in butter, and season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Put them inside the capon, fasten some buttered paper over it, and roast it before a clear fire. This dish is frequently served without any sauce, but, if liked, a little may be sent to table with it, made of good melted butter, flavoured with a quarter of a pound of truffles, peeled, and pounded in a mortar with half an ounce of butter, and pressed through a sieve. Time to roast, one hour or more. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, from 2s. 6d. to 4s.
A spit-roasting recipe that assumes two things a modern kitchen lacks: an open fire with a dripping pan, and fresh truffles by the quarter-pound. Both can be worked around, but the timing needs adjusting.
- The caponA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh; it is rarely sold outside specialist butchers. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken is the standard substitute, and a small free-range bird will give the closest texture.
- Timing is the weak point"One hour or more" reflects a fierce open fire. A stuffed 4-5 lb chicken needs roughly 1 hour 30 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes, and should reach 165F/74C in the thickest part of the thigh, not touching bone.
- Before a clear fire, in oven termsBefore a clear fire -- "A clear fire" means one burned down to glowing coals with no smoke or flame. The book gives no oven setting; if you are adapting to an oven, 425F/220C for 15 minutes and then 350F/175C for the remainder is one workable approach.
- The buttered paperThis is barding by another name, protecting the breast from radiant heat. Buttered parchment still works, or loosely tented foil; remove it for the last 20 minutes to let the skin colour.
- Truffles, then and nowThe book assumes fresh truffle at a price the household could absorb. Preserved truffle in brine or jars is the practical stand-in, and far less of it: 1-2 oz sliced for the cavity is generous. Truffle oil is a poor substitute here, as its aroma is unlikely to survive an hour of roasting.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a light butter sauce, butter worked into a little flour and water or stock and brought together off a fierce heat. Pounded truffle stirred in at the end, then sieved, gives the sauce described.
- Slicing the truffleA quarter of an inch is thick by modern taste. Thinner slices, briefly warmed in butter rather than fried hard, hold their aroma better; heavy frying drives off most of what you paid for.
- Yield and costFour to five people, as stated. The stated probable cost is 2s. 6d. to 4s.; the text does not say whether that covers the quarter-pound of truffles for the optional sauce.
Truffled poultry was one of the fixed luxuries of nineteenth-century dining, and Cassell's gives it in the plainest possible form: bird, truffles, butter, fire. The technique of packing sliced truffle inside the cavity a day or two before cooking, so the fat of the bird takes up the scent, is generally traced to French practice and appears across English cookery writing of the period under the heading of dinde or poularde truffée. The capon was a prominent festive bird of the British table before the turkey largely displaced it; caponising produced a heavier, fatter carcass than a cockerel would give, which suited a long turn on the spit with nothing but paper to shield it. That the recipe offers the sauce as optional, "frequently served without any sauce," is a sign of how the truffle was regarded here: an ingredient expensive enough to be its own seasoning.