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Roti De Pauvre Homme
Take a fine pullet or capon, the fattest procurable. Make a forcemeat, consisting of some finely-chopped sausage-meat, raw veal and lean ham, cock's kidneys and combs, dried artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, truffles, some shredded parsley, a little lemon thyme and sweet basil, one anchovy washed, boned, and chopped fine--the whole chopped and well mixed together, seasoned with salt, pepper, and a little grated nutmeg, with a good lump of fresh butter well incorporated with it. With this forcemeat fill the fowl by the vent, which sew up afterwards. Saturate with butter or olive-oil three or four sheets of writing-paper, and carefully dredge the fowl with flour. Envelop the bird in the paper two layers thick, and cover the whole with another layer slightly buttered. Burry the bird thus prepared in hot wood-ashes until it is cooked, or put it in a range oven, covered with a dish, which must exclude the air from beneath.
A stuffed roasting fowl cooked in a paper case rather than on a spit. Everything hinges on the wrapper: it has to be greaseproof and it has to stay intact, or the flour dredge burns and the bird dries out.
- Do not use writing paperModern paper carries bleaches, coatings and inks that should not touch food. Use two or three layers of buttered parchment, tied or folded closed at the seams.
- Ignore the wood ashesBurying the parcel in hot ashes is a hearth technique with no controllable temperature. Take the second option given: a range oven with the parcel covered by an inverted dish, as the recipe directs. The book gives no temperature; a moderate oven of around 375F is a modern guess, not the original instruction.
- Capon and pulletA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened and rarely sold now; a pullet is a young hen under a year. A 4-5 lb free-range chicken is the practical stand-in, and the fattest bird you can find is genuinely the right choice here since the paper traps rather than crisps the skin.
- Cock's kidneys and combsBoth were standard garnish items in Victorian professional kitchens and are effectively unobtainable outside specialist butchers. Omit them; the forcemeat loses gelatinous texture but nothing essential in flavour.
- Dried artichoke bottomsThese need soaking several hours before chopping. Tinned or frozen artichoke hearts, drained and patted dry, substitute directly. Truffle can be reduced to a small amount of preserved truffle or dropped without wrecking the dish.
- Forcemeat proportionsThe original gives no quantities. For a 5 lb bird, roughly 8 oz sausage meat, 4 oz minced veal and 3 oz lean ham makes a stuffing that fills the cavity without packing it tight. Keep it loose so heat can reach the centre.
- DonenessA stuffed bird needs the stuffing itself at 165F, not just the thigh, and that takes longer than an unstuffed roast of the same weight. Allow around 25 minutes per pound at 375F and check with a probe pushed into the centre of the forcemeat.
- ServingOpen the parcel at the table or the aroma is wasted. A 5 lb bird with this quantity of stuffing serves six.
The name translates as "poor man's roast," which is a joke at the reader's expense: the forcemeat calls for veal, ham, truffles, anchovy and cock's combs, none of them poor man's food. The poverty is in the equipment rather than the ingredients. A household without a spit, a jack or a proper roasting range could still cook a whole bird by sealing it in greased paper and burying it in the embers of the hearth, and the dish belongs to that older tradition of ash-cookery that is often said to have persisted in French country practice long after urban kitchens had closed ranges. The paper wrapping is a close relative of cooking en papillote. The instruction to cover the parcel with a dish that excludes air from beneath is the compiler's attempt to mimic, in a range oven, the smothered heat of ashes.