Roasted Capon
1 capon. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 can button mushrooms. 1/4 teaspoon cayenne. 1 slice pork. 1 sweetbread.
Fry sweetbread and mushrooms in fat. Rub capon with butter, pepper and salt, stuff and roast until tender.
Mrs. Wilson's shorthand assumes a cook who already knows how to dress and roast a bird; almost everything worth saying here is in what she leaves out.
- The caponA capon is a young castrated rooster, fattened for tender, well-marbled meat and typically 6 to 9 lb dressed. Some butchers and mail-order poultry sellers still carry them; otherwise use a 5 to 6 lb roasting chicken and expect slightly leaner breast meat.
- The stuffing is the whole recipeThe ingredient list is essentially a filling: the sweetbread and mushrooms are fried and go into the cavity, with the slice of pork most likely supplying the fat they are fried in. No bread or crumb is named, so the filling would stay loose and rich.
- Sweetbread preparationVeal sweetbreads (thymus or pancreas) need soaking in several changes of cold water for an hour or two, then a brief blanch, then peeling of the outer membrane before they are cut up and fried. Skipping this leaves them bloody and tough. Order them ahead; they are rarely on display.
- "1 slice pork"Most likely a slice of fat pork or salt pork, diced, to render the fat the sweetbread and mushrooms fry in, though the recipe does not say so and a slice laid over the bird is an equally plausible reading. If you use salt pork, hold back most of the half teaspoon of salt.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod cans of button mushrooms ran roughly 4 to 8 oz, so the quantity is approximate. Drain and dry them well before frying or they will steam rather than brown; fresh small buttons, quartered, are a fair substitute.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in the filling of a large bird reads as warmth rather than heat, but ground cayenne varies a good deal in strength. Start with an eighth if you are unsure.
- Oven and time"Roast until tender" for a stuffed bird of this size means 325 to 350F, allowing roughly 20 minutes per pound plus a margin. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, and check the center of the stuffing as well, which contains offal and pork and should also reach 165F.
- YieldA 6 to 8 lb capon with this filling serves 8 to 10. Rest the bird 20 minutes before carving; spoon the stuffing out separately.
Mary A. Wilson's domestic-science columns are associated with Philadelphia newspaper work, and she built her reputation on wartime and postwar household economy, which makes this one of the more extravagant entries in her book: capon, sweetbreads and canned mushrooms were all premium goods, the sort of thing put on the table for company rather than a Tuesday. Capons were a standard American festival bird well into the mid-twentieth century, valued because castration produced a heavier, fatter, more tender carcass than a cockerel would give; the practice has largely given way to fast-growing broiler breeds, which is why the word has quietly left most butcher counters. Sweetbreads, meanwhile, were a genuine delicacy in this period. The telegraphic style of the instructions is characteristic of Wilson's collected columns, which were compressed for newspaper and magazine space and assumed a reader who needed the proportions rather than the method.