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Capon, Stewed
Blanch and boil, as if for curry, three-quarters of a pound of Patna rice. While it is cooking, fry three sliced onions in three table-spoonfuls of butter or dripping, and with them a fine capon cut into joints. When fried, put the fowl and the onions into a stewpan, with sufficient nicely-flavoured stock to cover them, and let them stew gently until tender. Mix a little of the gravy with the rice, season it, then spread it on a dish, and lay the stewed capon upon it. Thicken the gravy, and pour a little of it upon the dish, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Time to stew, about an hour. Probable cost, from 2s. 6d. to 4s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward braise of jointed bird on a bed of rice, of the kind Cassell's liked to file under general principles rather than as a named dish. Two things need translating: the bird itself, and what "boil, as if for curry" meant to a Victorian cook.
- CaponA cockerel castrated to fatten, generally a considerably larger and fatter bird than an ordinary roasting chicken, and now rarely stocked outside specialist butchers. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken jointed into eight pieces behaves the same way in a stewpan.
- Patna riceA long-grain rice from Bihar, the standard "curry rice" of British kitchens before basmati became common. Any long-grain white rice works; three-quarters of a pound is about 1 3/4 cups dry, which yields a very generous bed for four or five.
- Rice "as if for curry"The period method was to boil the grains hard in a large volume of salted water, drain, and dry them out so they stayed separate rather than creamy. Nine to twelve minutes in plenty of boiling water, drained and left uncovered to steam off, gives what the recipe expects.
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat, still worth using if you have it for the depth it gives the onions. Butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, is the usual substitute; three tablespoons is a lot of fat for three onions and can be cut back.
- The hinge: brown properly, then barely simmerThe frying step is where all the colour and flavour comes from, so take the joints to a real deep brown before they go in the stewpan. After that keep the liquid at a bare tremble; a rolling boil in an hour will leave the breast meat stringy.
- Timing by cutAn hour suits legs and thighs, but breast pieces are done in 25-30 minutes and are better lifted out and returned at the end. Chicken should reach 165F / 74C at the thickest point of the thigh.
- "Sufficient nicely-flavoured stock"Roughly 3 to 4 cups for a jointed bird in a snug pan, enough to cover but no more, or the gravy will need heavy reduction. Chicken stock is obvious; veal stock was also common in period kitchens.
- Thickening the gravyStrain, skim the fat, and whisk in beurre mani flour kneaded into an equal weight of butter, about a tablespoon of each per cup and simmer two minutes to lose the raw taste. Cornstarch slurry is quicker but gives a glossier, less rounded sauce.
- Cost and yieldThe 2s. 6d. to 4s. is late-Victorian money for the bird and rice together, a noticeable outlay by the standards of the book's own costings. Four or five servings is accurate if the rice is served as written.
Cassell's gives this as an entry under Capon in its alphabetical dictionary, where a single bird is stretched with a starch and a sauce rather than presented whole, and the pairing of jointed fowl with plain boiled Patna rice shows how thoroughly Anglo-Indian habits had settled into the ordinary British repertoire by the 1870s and 80s. "As if for curry" needed no further explanation to the book's readers; the dry, separate-grained boiled rice was the accepted English treatment, and rice reaching Britain through Calcutta was generally sold under the name Patna whatever its precise origin. The capon belongs to an older tradition entirely: caponising was practised from antiquity to produce a larger, fatter, more tender bird than a cockerel, and the capon was for centuries the festive fowl of European tables. It faded from British butchery in the twentieth century, a decline often attributed to the rise of fast-growing broiler breeds, which is why a recipe calling for one now reads as a period marker.