Capon
Take a capon, split through the back, put in baking pan, season with 2 tablespoons butter, pepper and salt to taste, 2 tablespoons of flour, and 2 cups water. Baste often and cook until tender and brown. Toast some half slices of bread, lay on dish and put capon on toast and pour gravy over it. You can garnish with slices of hard boiled eggs.
A plain roasted split bird with a pan gravy made in place, from a period when a capon was a common butcher's item. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no time, so both have to be supplied.
- What a capon isA capon is a young rooster castrated before maturity, which fattens more evenly and stays tender at a larger size — typically 6 to 9 lb dressed. Some specialty butchers still carry them; otherwise use a 5 to 6 lb roasting chicken and expect slightly leaner meat.
- Oven heatNothing is stated. Start at 425°F for the first 20 minutes to set the browning, then drop to 350°F for the rest. A split 6 lb bird runs roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours total.
- Split through the backThis is spatchcocking. Cut down either side of the backbone, open the bird out flat, press the breastbone until it cracks, and lay it skin up. Flat means faster and more even cooking, which is the whole point of the instruction.
- Doneness"Until tender and brown" is not a test. Take the thigh joint to 165°F on a thermometer.
- The flour and waterThe 2 tablespoons of flour and 2 cups of water are the gravy, built in the pan rather than made separately. Scatter the flour over the buttered bird and pour the water into the pan, not over the skin, or the crust never forms. Add more water during roasting if the pan threatens to scorch.
- BastingThe recipe asks for frequent basting, which suited an oven of uncertain heat. It does cool the oven each time the door opens; three or four bastings over the roast are enough with modern equipment.
- Finishing the gravyTip the pan juices into a small saucepan, skim the fat, and simmer a few minutes to lose the raw-flour taste before it goes over the bird. Season again at this stage.
- The toastToast the bread dark and dry, and assemble at the table. Bread laid under a bird and sauced early collapses within a few minutes.
- YieldA capon of this size serves six to eight; a 5 lb chicken, four to five.
Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia households around the end of the First World War, when a capon sat between an everyday fowl and a turkey — bigger and fatter than a hen, less ceremonial than a goose — and was one option for a Sunday or holiday roast. Serving a roast bird on toast, with the pan gravy poured over so the bread absorbs it, follows an older English habit of using bread to take up the juices of a roast. The garnish of sliced hard-boiled egg is common in recipes of this period, where a plain brown dish was given some contrast on the platter. Capons became much less common on ordinary American butcher counters over the later twentieth century, as fast-growing broiler breeds made the extra months of raising them harder to justify.