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Boiled Barded Capon with Mushrooms
Take a young capon, singe and draw it, fill it within with bread-stuffing of veal or forcemeat, with the stems of some chopped mushrooms added. Put a slice of fat bacon on the breast, score a little and tie it on. Put it in a stewpan with enough unskimmed broth to cover it, add spices and aromatics to flavor. Place the pan on a slow fire, broil one hour. When it is cooked take it from the pan, skim off the fat from the stock, and make a little white sauce reduced with the liquor, in which a few mushrooms have been boiled. Add the yolks of two eggs to thicken it. When ready to serve, remove the string and bacon.
A poached rather than roasted bird, finished with a velouté enriched with egg yolks. Two words in the original will mislead a modern reader: broil here means nothing of the sort, and barded refers to the bacon tied over the breast.
- The hinge: the egg-yolk liaisonOnce the yolks go into the reduced sauce it must not boil, or it will curdle into scrambled egg in broth. Temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce first, return them off the heat, and hold the sauce below a simmer, around 180F.
- "Broil one hour" means simmerThe bird sits covered in broth on a slow fire; this is poaching. Keep the liquid at a bare tremble, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil shreds the breast and clouds the stock you are about to turn into sauce.
- Finding a caponA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh. Some butchers and holiday markets still carry them at 6-8 lb; otherwise use a good 4-5 lb roasting chicken and reduce the poaching time to about 50 minutes.
- BardingThe "slice of fat bacon" is most likely unsmoked back fat or salt pork rather than modern smoked streaky bacon, which would flavor the whole pot. Ask for fatback, or use thin sheets of caul fat. Score it lightly so it molds to the breast and tie with butcher's twine.
- Unskimmed brothThe broth goes in unskimmed, as written. The fat is skimmed off afterward, before the sauce is made, and that step is not optional if you want a clean velouté.
- Spices and aromaticsUnspecified in the text. A reasonable reading is onion stuck with two cloves, a carrot, leek, a bay leaf, thyme, parsley stems and a few peppercorns.
- Stuffing and donenessA stuffed poached bird heats slowly at the center. Check that both the thickest part of the thigh and the middle of the stuffing reach 165F before you take it from the pan; add time rather than raising the heat.
- MushroomsThe chopped stems go into the forcemeat; the sauce is reduced with the liquor in which a few mushrooms have been boiled. Button mushrooms are the likeliest reading. Reserve that cooking liquid, it carries most of the flavor.
- YieldA capon of this size serves six to eight; a 4-5 lb chicken, four. Serve the bird carved with the sauce and mushrooms spooned over, with rice or boiled potatoes.
Poached capon dressed in a white sauce is one of the oldest set pieces of French cooking, and by the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his book at the Waldorf it was already a dish that signaled classical training rather than novelty. The capon itself was a luxury of the barnyard: a bird surgically altered so it would fatten quietly and grow tender, common on European and American tables through the nineteenth century and increasingly rare once fast-growing broiler breeds took over in the twentieth. Barding, tying fat over the breast, addressed the perennial problem of lean white meat drying out, and the egg-yolk liaison here is the standard finish of a sauce allemande, which Careme counted among his own grandes sauces and which later practice treats as a derivative of veloute. The terse, assumption-heavy phrasing, no quantities, no times beyond "one hour," "spices and aromatics to flavor," is characteristic of the book's kitchen sections, which were written for cooks who already knew what the finished plate should look like.