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CAPON, STEWED (a la Francaise)
Draw, and truss for boiling, a fine capon. Rub it over with a little lemon-juice, and put it into a stewpan with some slices of bacon under and over it. Cover it with some nicely-flavoured stock, salted and peppered, and additionally flavoured with an onion stuck with three or four cloves. Let it stew gently for an hour, then take it up, strain the gravy, and thicken it with a little flour and butter, and add a glass of white wine. Pour the gravy round the dish, and serve. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, from 2s. 6d. to 4s.
A gentle poach in stock with bacon, finished with a flour-and-butter thickening and white wine. The method transfers directly to a supermarket chicken.
- CaponA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh; they are hard to find now outside specialist butchers and seasonal sales. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken is the practical substitute for the stated yield of five or six.
- Draw and truss"Draw" means remove the innards, already done on any bird you buy. Trussing here matters for shape: tie the legs together and the wings against the body so the bird holds its form through an hour in liquid.
- The hinge is the simmer"Stew gently" means barely trembling liquid, no more. A rolling boil will shred the breast and cloud the stock you are about to turn into sauce.
- TimingAn hour suits a 4-5 lb bird if the stock is already hot when it goes in; check that the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F/74C. A larger bird may want 75-90 minutes.
- The baconBacon of the period was generally fatter than modern rashers, and here it functions as a barding layer rather than as a smoke flavouring. Use unsmoked streaky or pancetta; heavily smoked supermarket rashers will dominate the sauce.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" is a beurre manié: equal weights of flour and butter mashed together and whisked into the strained, simmering liquid in small pieces, adding only as much as you need. Reduce the strained stock first if it tastes thin -- an hour with a whole bird gives a lot of liquid.
- A glass of wineA wineglass in Victorian cookery is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, though the measure was never fixed. Add it with enough simmering left to cook off the raw edge, three or four minutes at least.
- ServingThe sauce goes round the bird, not over it, as the original specifies. Carve at table, and keep the bird covered while the sauce finishes or it will go cold.
Capons were the standard festive bird of English and French kitchens for centuries before the fast-growing broiler chicken displaced them in the twentieth century: caponising produced a larger, fatter, more tender carcass than a cockerel left intact, and the practice is recorded from antiquity onward. The "à la Française" of the title signals the treatment rather than any single French dish -- barding with bacon, poaching in flavoured stock, and finishing the strained cooking liquid with a flour-and-butter binding and wine is the plain domestic end of French sauce-making as Victorian cookery writers absorbed it. Cassell's habit of printing a "probable cost" is worth noting: 2s. 6d. to 4s. was real money for a household bird.