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Capon Pie
Separate the flesh from the bones of a cold roasted capon and cut it into slices with the exception of the thighs and pinions, which should be left whole. Remove the skin from and boil about one-half pound of chestnuts, chop fine in equal quantities some thyme, sweet marjoram and pennyroyal; line a pastrypan with paste, put in it the thighs and pinions and strew over them a quantity of minced onions; then put in flesh of the bird with four sweetbreads and half a dozen oysters cut in halves, season them with sweet herbs, salt, cloves, grated nutmeg and a bit of mace; cover with the chestnuts and put a few small pieces of butter over. Close the pan and bake the pasty in a quick oven. Meanwhile prepare a sauce with gravy, stock, drawn butter, two or three boned and filleted anchovies and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. When cooked, garnish the pasty with slices of lemon, pour the sauce over it, and serve.
The pie itself is a straightforward late-Victorian construction, but one herb in the seasoning is no longer regarded as food. That single ingredient is why this page is a reading text rather than a working one.
- Pennyroyal is the problemMentha pulegium is high in pulegone, a compound metabolised in the liver to a hepatotoxin; poisoning cases from pennyroyal preparations are well documented, and the plant has long been used as an abortifacient. Pennyroyal oil is not permitted as a food flavouring, and pulegone itself is restricted in US and EU food law; there is no established safe culinary dose. Nothing about baking it in a pie reduces the risk.
- Not a matter of quantityThe recipe calls for pennyroyal in equal measure with thyme and marjoram, and gives no quantity for any of them, in a herb whose toxicity is dose-dependent and whose concentration varies with the plant. If you want a capon or chicken pie, work from a current recipe.
- SweetbreadsThe thymus or pancreas glands of a young animal, usually veal; sold today by butchers who handle offal and usually requiring soaking, blanching and peeling before use. The recipe does not say what animal is meant.
- PinionsThe pinion is the outer wing joint, the wing tip section. Along with the thighs it is left on the bone and laid in the bottom of the pie, with the sliced meat put in above it.
- CaponA castrated cockerel, fattened for a heavier, richer carcass, and now hard to find outside specialty butchers in much of the English-speaking world. The recipe assumes one already roasted and gone cold.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter, but the standard nineteenth-century sauce base: melted butter thickened with a little flour and thinned with liquid. With the anchovies and nutmeg it makes a thin gravy, which the recipe directs to be poured over the pasty rather than sealed inside.
- "Quick oven"A period term for a hot oven. Noted for reference only; do not treat it as an instruction to proceed.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection includes this pie, and its cold roast fowl, chestnuts, oysters, sweetbreads, anchovy in the sauce and lemon slices on top belong to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition of the great raised meat pie rather than to the French repertoire. The anchovy-and-nutmeg sauce is a survival of that older English seasoning habit, in which a salted fish gave savour to a dish. Pennyroyal, too, is a period marker: it appears alongside thyme and marjoram in English herb lists for centuries, valued as a strong mint for puddings and stuffings, though the reasons for its disappearance from kitchens are less certain.