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Capilotade of Chicken
Take some remains of cold roasted chickens and cut them into pieces. Put in a stewpan two ounces of butter with two tablespoonfuls of flour and stir over the fire until well mixed; then put in a few chopped herbs and some mushrooms that have been scalded and cut up into small pieces, and fry them; when browned, pour over half a pint of white wine and an equal quantity of broth and boil gently for twenty minutes. Put the pieces of chicken into the sauce and stew them slowly for about fifteen minutes. Turn the stew onto a hot dish, garnish with sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A leftovers dish dressed up in French service language. The whole point is that the chicken is already cooked, so the sauce does the work and the meat only needs warming through.
- Half a pintIn this American book half a pint is 8 fl oz, one cup. So the sauce is one cup wine plus one cup broth, two cups in all.
- The roux is looseTwo ounces of butter to two tablespoons of flour is butter-heavy, and that flour will not thicken two cups of liquid much. Expect a thin, glossy sauce; the twenty-minute gentle boil is there to reduce it, so let it actually reduce rather than covering the pan.
- Brown the roux, then the mushrooms"Stir over the fire until well mixed" then "when browned" means you are after a blond-to-light-brown roux with the herbs and mushrooms sweated into it. Colour here is most of the flavour.
- Scalded mushroomsScalding meant a brief dip in boiling water, which firms them and helps keep them from discolouring; period cookery often calls for it, though the reason is not stated here. With cultivated white or cremini, skip it and simply cook them in the butter until they give up their water.
- Add wine off the boilWine and broth -- The recipe adds both together; if you prefer, pour the wine in first and let it bubble down a little before the broth. A dry white — anything you would drink — not a cooking wine.
- Fifteen minutes is the ceilingAlready-roasted chicken has nothing left to gain from stewing. Keep the pan at a bare shiver and pull it at fifteen minutes, or sooner if the pieces are small; a real simmer will shred breast meat into strings.
- HerbsThe recipe names none. A plausible choice for the period is parsley with some combination of chervil, thyme and a little tarragon. Add the hardy ones with the mushrooms and the parsley at the end.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toast; croutons here are the same shape fried in butter or clarified fat. Set them around the rim of the dish so they stay crisp against the sauce.
- YieldThe meat off one roast chicken with two cups of sauce serves three to four, with rice, noodles or plain boiled potatoes.
Capilotade is old French kitchen slang for a dish of cooked meat cut up and rewarmed in a sauce — the word carries a faint sense of hash or jumble, and in ordinary French "en capilotade" still means beaten to a pulp. It belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century rechauffés: salmi, hachis, croquettes, minces, all built on the assumption that a household roasted large birds and joints and had to account for what came back from the table. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that a hotel kitchen the size of the Waldorf's had exactly the same problem as a private cook, only on a larger scale, and that the grand French vocabulary of the period was applied as readily to yesterday's chicken as to anything sent up whole. The garnish of sippets is an English habit of setting toast around a stew to soak up sauce, attested well before this French naming.