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Boiled Capon with Cauliflower Sauce
Prepare and cook a capon same as Boiled Fowl, and serve surrounded with Cauliflower Sauce and garnished with parsley.
This is a cross-reference recipe: nearly all the work sits in the two dishes it points to, Boiled Fowl and Cauliflower Sauce. What follows fills in what the line assumes you already know.
- CaponA capon is a young rooster castrated to fatten, giving more fat and finer-grained breast meat than a hen; dressed weights were generally larger than an ordinary chicken's, commonly in the region of six to nine pounds. Some butchers still carry them near the winter holidays; otherwise use a 5-6 lb roasting chicken and expect a slightly leaner result.
- "Boiled" means simmeredThe hinge of the whole dish. Boiled-fowl directions of this kind generally start the bird in boiling water and then hold the pot below the boil for the rest of the cooking; check the Boiled Fowl recipe itself for the exact sequence. A rolling boil shreds the breast and clouds the broth; keep the surface barely trembling.
- TimingFigure roughly 20-25 minutes per pound for a bird this size, so 2 to 2.5 hours, plus resting in the liquid. Judge by the thigh reaching 175F and the leg joint moving freely rather than by the clock.
- Season the waterSome period boiled-fowl directions hold back the salt until late in the cooking, on the theory that early salting toughens the meat. The evidence for that is thin; salting the cooking water from the start, about a tablespoon per quart, gives better-seasoned meat than relying on the sauce alone.
- Cauliflower sauceSauces of this name are normally a white sauce, butter and flour cooked together and thinned with milk or with the strained cooking broth, with cooked cauliflower florets stirred in, sometimes partly broken up; follow the book's own Cauliflower Sauce for proportions. Cook the cauliflower separately and only until tender; boiled with the bird it turns sulfurous.
- Serving"Surrounded with" is literal: the sauce is poured around the bird on the platter, not over it, so the skin stays visible. Carve at the table. A 6 lb capon serves six to eight.
- The brothYou will be left with several quarts of excellent poultry stock. Strain, chill, lift the fat, and keep it.
Boiled fowl was the standard formal treatment for an older or larger bird in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens, where roasting suited young chickens and long moist heat suited everything else. The capon existed for exactly this purpose: a fattened bird brought out for a company dinner, its extra fat keeping the meat from drying in the pot. The white sauce built on cauliflower belongs to the same tradition of pale, mild sauces for pale meats. That such a dish gets so brief an entry here, resting entirely on cross-references, says something about how the Boston Cooking School taught: master the base method and the sauces, and the menu assembles itself.