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Capon, Stuffed with Chestnuts
Pare a dozen large sound chestnuts, and blanch them like almonds. Stew them very gently for twenty minutes. Drain and pound them; then mix with them the liver of the capon boiled and finely minced, two table-spoonfuls of fine bread-crumbs, a piece of fresh butter the size of a small egg, half a tea-spoonful of lemon-rind, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, a salt-spoonful of salt and the same of pepper, and a little nutmeg. Bind the forcemeat together with the yolks of two eggs. Fill the capon with this mixture, cover it with oiled paper, and roast it before a good fire. When it is sufficiently cooked, brush it over with beaten egg, dredge fine bread-crumbs over it, and brown it. Serve with half a pint of good melted butter, to which has been added three chopped gherkins. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. to 4s. Time to roast, one hour. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian roast whose two archaic terms — the capon itself and the "melted butter" served with it — do most of the work of confusing modern readers. Sort those out and the rest is straightforward.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly a roux of butter and flour let down with water or stock, not a jug of clarified butter. Half a pint of plain melted butter with gherkins in it would be nearly undrinkable; make a light butter sauce and stir the chopped gherkins in at the end.
- CaponA castrated cockerel, fattened for tenderness and fat cover, and hard to find at retail now outside specialist butchers and holiday seasons. A 4–5 lb roasting chicken is the usual substitute; a small free-range bird has closer to the right fat and flavour than a large industrial one.
- Roasting time and temperature"Before a good fire" means spit-roasting with radiant heat. In an oven, 400F is a reasonable equivalent. One hour will not cook a stuffed 5 lb bird through — expect 1½ to 1¾ hours, and go by temperature: 165F in the thickest part of the breast, 175F in the thigh, and 165F in the centre of the stuffing.
- Stuffing a bird safelyThe forcemeat contains raw egg yolk and cooked liver and sits in the cavity, so it heats slowly. Pack it loosely, not tightly, or the centre lags behind the meat. Cooking the stuffing separately in a dish is the safer modern habit and costs little in flavour.
- ChestnutsA dozen large chestnuts gives about 8 oz peeled weight. Scoring and boiling the shells briefly makes both shell and inner skin come away; vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work and skip the twenty-minute stew, needing only to be warmed and pounded.
- Small measuresA salt-spoonful is about ¼ teaspoon. "A piece of fresh butter the size of a small egg" is roughly 1½ oz, or 3 tablespoons. "Half a tea-spoonful of lemon-rind" means finely grated zest.
- Oiled paperParchment brushed with oil, tied or tucked over the breast to keep it from scorching under radiant heat. Foil serves the same purpose in an oven; remove it for the last stage.
- The egg-and-crumb finishThe final brushing with beaten egg and dredging with crumbs must go on a hot bird and then straight back into the heat for a few minutes, or the egg stays slack. Watch it — crumbs on a chicken that is already browned burn quickly.
- YieldFour or five, as stated, with the stuffing counted as part of the meal. With sides it will stretch to six.
Chestnut forcemeat for poultry has a long history in European cookery, and appears in English books from the eighteenth century onward as one dressing among several for turkey, capon and boiling fowl. The capon is the point of interest here: castrating and fattening a cockerel produced a bird larger and more tender than a hen, and until the early twentieth century capons were a recognised market grade with their own prices, which is why a cost of 2s. 6d. to 4s. could be quoted and readers be expected to know what they were buying. The instruction to roast "before a good fire" rather than in an oven dates the method as much as the bird does — this is spit or bottle-jack roasting, with the joint turning in front of radiant coals and a dripping pan beneath, a technique English cooks defended as superior to oven roasting well after closed ranges had become common. The gherkins in the butter sauce reflect the Victorian fondness for a sharp pickled note against rich roast meat, the same instinct that put pickled walnuts and mushroom ketchup on the same tables.