Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Braised Capon
Braised Capon
Take a capon, draw and truss it, put it into a braisingpan with half a pound of fat bacon, sliced; add one tablespoonful of butter and a pint of veal broth. Place it on a brisk fire, which will give the capon a brown color. Then remove it to a moderate fire, and put some hot coals or embers on the top, and braise the capon for an hour. Skim off the fat from the liquor, add half a pint of good stock, reduce it to a half-glaze, strain and pour over the capon. Capons may be stuffed with truffles, chestnuts, sausages, olives, or plain veal stuffing.
Braised Capon, Chipolata Style Choose a fine young capon, draw and singe it, and truss as if for boiling. Peel a lemon, slice it, lay the slices on the capon, and support them with thin layers of bacon fat. Tie them up, and put the capon into a stewpan spread with vegetables and trimmings of fat. Allow it to cook for a few minutes, and add ten or twelve ounces of pickled pork. Then pour in sufficient good broth and white wine to cover one-half the height of the capon. Boil it up and put the capon on a moderate fire, so that it will braise slowly. It will be necessary to turn it several times, and will require about an hour and a quarter to cook thoroughly. When done, remove the pan from the fire, and twenty minutes before serving put about twenty small chipolata sausages, or one large common sausage (not too thick), into the pan. Chipolata sausages are made of poultry meat, bacon, and bread-pulp. When ready take out the capon, strain through a sieve the cooking stock, remove the fat, and reduce it to half-glaze, adding a few tablespoonfuls of good brown sauce and two or three dozen fresh mushrooms. When it is sufficiently reduced add the sausages, the pork cut into squares, twenty-four cooked chestnuts, and the same number of small glazed onions. Place the capon on a dish, garnish with onions, sausages, etc., and serve with the sauce.
Braised Capon, Financiere Take one capon; pluck, singe and draw it, remove the forked part of the breastbone, fill the crop skin with butter seasoned with pepper and salt, and truss the capon in the same way you would for roasting. Lard the breast with strips of bacon fat, and tie some slices of fat bacon over the remainder of the capon; that is, the parts not larded. Put it into the braisingpan with a sufficient quantity of good stock to come above the pinions, then lay a round of buttered paper over the capon, cover over the pan, and let it simmer for an hour. Remove the paper and glaze the parts that are larded. Then make a ragout of foies gras, cut in scallops, mushrooms, and some small chicken quenelles mixed in financiere sauce, and put it on a dish round a block of fried bread, made by cutting the crumb of bread in the shape of a block eight inches in height, six inches square at the base, and three and one-half inches square at the top; fry this in some boiling fat, let it drain, and it is then ready for use. It can be fixed to the dish with a little paste made of egg and flour. Arrange the capon with its crop downward, and place two geese's fat livers, studded with small truffles, between them on the other two sides of the bread. Range a crayfish on either side of the geese's fat livers, and cockscomb on the top. Put a larded sweetbread on the top of the bread support, then garnish three silver skewers with cockscombs, crayfish and mushrooms, in the order named, and thrust them into the capon and sweetbreads. Put some financiere sauce in a sauceboat, and serve.
Braised Capon, Godard Style Prepare and cook one capon as for braised capons, financiere, but do not lard the breasts. Then make a stew of cockscombs, truffles and mushrooms moistened with Godard sauce. Prepare a dish with a bread support and croutons of fried bread round the edge; pour in the stew and garnish with cockscomb, truffles, some larded sweet-breads, and a large quenelle ornamented with truffles and tongues in the following order: a larded sweetbread on each of the sides and one on the top of the bread and a quenelle on top of the two sweetbreads; put that on the dish by the side of the bread; place a truffle on the top of each quenelle and one on each side of the sweetbreads, leaving a little space between and a cockscomb in the space left between the sweetbreads and the truffles and one at the base of the capon. Then take a silver skewer and put two cockscombs and a truffle on it and thrust it into the bread support between the legs of the capon. Serve some Godard sauce separately in a sauceboat.
Braised Capon with Sweetbread and Truffles Prepare and truss a capon as for capons, financiere. Then make a stew of chicken quenelles and cut mushrooms mixed in a Regence sauce. When the capon is done, drain and place it on a dish and lean it against a block of fried bread with the crop downwards. Then place one braised sweetbread below the capon and one on the top of the bread. Put a crayfish on each side of the sweetbread except the sweetbread on the top and a truffle on each crayfish. Serve with some Regence sauce in a sauceboat.
Five variations on one method, written for a brigade with a coal range and a larder of garnishes. The core technique — brown hard, then braise gently under a lid — transfers directly; the garnish work is optional theatre.
- The birdA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattier and larger than a broiler and harder to come by than ordinary chicken; you may have to order one or look around the holidays. A 5-7 lb roasting chicken behaves the same way in a braise; time it by temperature, not the clock.
- Fires, translated"Brisk fire" means high heat for colour, which today means browning the bird in the pan on the stovetop or in a hot oven. "Moderate fire" with coals or embers heaped on the lid amounts to a covered Dutch oven at a low-to-moderate heat, with heat coming from above as well as below. The book gives no temperatures, so any figure is a guess at what it meant.
- The hingeThe liquid is not meant to submerge the bird: the chipolata version asks for broth and wine to half the height of the capon, the financiere version only for stock to come above the pinions. The book has you boil it up, then move it to a moderate fire to braise slowly -- keep it at a bare simmer thereafter. A bare simmer keeps the breast from tightening while the legs finish; a rolling boil gives dry, stringy meat under a good sauce.
- One hour is shortAn hour will not bring a large capon through. Cook until the thigh reads 175F and the breast at least 165F, then rest the bird while the sauce reduces — for a 6 lb bird expect closer to an hour and a half.
- Half-glazeDemi-glace here is literal instruction, not a jar: skim the braising liquor, strain it, add stock and reduce until it coats a spoon and is noticeably sticky. Salt only at the end, since reduction concentrates everything.
- ChipolataIn this book the word describes the garnish — sausages, chestnuts, glazed onions, diced pork — as much as the sausage itself. Modern chipolatas are thin pork links and stand in acceptably; twenty minutes in the pan is enough to cook them through.
- Garnishes that have goneCockscombs and the crop skin stuffed with butter belong to a vanished kind of service, and the fried bread "support" eight inches high is a plinth for presentation rather than eating. Financiere is a demi-glace derivative and Godard sauce is likewise generally built on a brown base; a good brown sauce with Madeira and mushroom is the practical equivalent.
- YieldNone is given. A bird of five to seven pounds serves six to eight, with the sausage, chestnut and onion garnish stretching it further.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, worked in a vocabulary that the classical French tradition — the Careme, Dubois and Gouffe line — had codified: a braised bird was not one dish but a base, named by whatever garniture arrived with it. Financiere, Godard, Regence and Chipolata were fixed formulas a cook was expected to know by heart, each with its own roster of quenelles, truffles, cockscombs and crayfish, and their appearance on an American menu at the turn of the century signalled a house that could afford French labour and French produce. The capon itself was the luxury poultry of the period — caponising produced a fatter, more tender bird than a laying hen or a young cockerel, and the practice was common enough that markets sold them by name. It has become far less common in the United States, displaced by fast-growing broiler breeds that arrive tender without surgery, which is why the bird at the centre of this recipe is now the hardest ingredient in it to find.