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Chicken Broth (Brodo di Capone)
This is made like the meat stock, substituting a fowl in place of the beef and bones.
The instruction is a cross-reference: make the household meat stock, but with a bird instead of beef and bones. Everything that matters is in what the original assumes you already know.
- What a capone isA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened and slaughtered at five to eight months, giving a heavy, fatty carcass with pronounced flavour. Butchers still sell them at holidays; otherwise a 4-5 lb roasting chicken, or better a stewing hen, stands in. A supermarket broiler of 3 lb makes thin broth.
- Water and ratioThe original gives no quantity; cover the bird by about two inches, which for a 5 lb fowl is in the region of 4 quarts of cold water. Starting in cold rather than hot water is the usual counsel, on the grounds that it extracts more soluble protein and gives a fuller-flavoured broth.
- The hinge: never let it boilBring it slowly to the barest tremble and hold it there. A rolling boil emulsifies the rendered fat into the liquid and shreds the coagulated protein, and no amount of straining afterwards will make the result clear again.
- SkimmingThe grey scum that rises in the first twenty minutes is coagulated albumin. Take it off with a shallow spoon as it appears rather than stirring it back in. The original names no vegetables; onion, carrot, celery and a few parsley stems are the usual Italian additions for brodo, and are commonly put in once the first scum has been removed.
- TimingTwo and a half to three hours at a bare simmer for a mature fowl; a young chicken is generally spent in about ninety minutes. Much beyond three hours tends to add little flavour while risking a cloudier broth.
- DegreasingA capon throws a lot of fat. Strain the broth, chill it, and lift the solid cap off the top. That fat is worth keeping for frying or for a risotto base.
- SaltThe original says nothing about salt. Many stock recipes of the period salt lightly or leave it out, on the reasoning that broth is a raw material for soups and sauces seasoned later; salting at the point of use is the safer course.
- Yield and servingRoughly 3 quarts from a 5 lb bird, depending on how hard it is allowed to reduce. Brodo functions here as a base for soups and risotto rather than as a dish on its own, though a cup of it with grated Parmesan is entirely traditional.
- The bird afterwardsThe boiled fowl is not waste. It was often served as a second course with salsa verde or mustard fruits, or picked for croquettes and salads.
Brodo di cappone is the holiday broth of northern Italy, the liquid in which tortellini and cappelletti are traditionally served at Christmas in Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. The capon was long the prestige bird of the Italian table: caponising produced a heavier, fatter carcass than a cockerel would reach, and the practice appears in European husbandry writing well before the modern poultry industry. That fat is much of what makes the broth worth naming after the bird, carrying flavour a lean chicken cannot supply. The book was published in 1912 for American readers under the pen name Antonia Isola, and is terse in a manner common to Italian cookery writing, where a cook is expected to know that stock is stock and only the animal changes.