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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Chablis
No. 139. Cappone con Riso (Capon with Rice) Ingredients: Capon, veal forcemeat, fat bacon, stock, rice, truffles, mushrooms, fowls' liver, suprême sauce, milk, Chablis.
Stuff a fine capon with a good firm forcemeat made of veal, tongue, ham, and chopped truffles; cover it with larding bacon; tie it up in buttered paper, and cook it in very good white stock.
In the meantime boil four ounces of rice in milk till quite stiff, mix in some chopped truffles, and make ten little timbales of it. Take out the capon when it is sufficiently cooked and place it on a dish; garnish it with cooked mushrooms, cocks' combs, kidneys, or fowls' livers, and pour a sauce suprême (No.16) over it; round the dish place the timbales of rice, and between each put a whole truffle cooked in white wine. Serve a sauce suprême in a sauce bowl.
A grand-service poached capon from the era when a bird was cooked in stock rather than roasted and then dressed with garnishes on the platter. Most of the work is in the components; the bird itself is simple.
- The caponA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled meat, and you will rarely find one outside a specialist butcher at Christmas. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken behaves the same way in this method; allow about 1 hour 15 minutes at a bare simmer.
- Poach, never boilThe hinge of the dish is the stock temperature. "Very good white stock" should shudder rather than bubble; a rolling boil will shred the breast and cloud the liquid you may want for the sauce.
- Larding bacon and buttered paperLarding bacon is unsmoked fat back or streaky bacon, laid over the breast to stop it drying. The buttered paper is a parchment wrap tied with string, the ancestor of the foil parcel, and it keeps the bacon and stuffing in place during poaching.
- The forcemeatVeal, tongue, ham and truffle, ground and bound, is a classic godiveau-style stuffing. Because it is inside a poached bird it needs to reach 165F/74C at the centre, which is the real limiting factor on cooking time - check the stuffing, not just the thigh.
- Rice timbalesFour ounces is a scant 2/3 cup of raw rice, cooked in milk until it is stiff enough to hold a shape - short-grain rice works best; long-grain sets far less reliably. Pack into buttered dariole moulds or ramekins, press well, rest a few minutes, then turn out.
- Cocks' combs and kidneysBoth were standard garnishes in nineteenth-century French service and are effectively unobtainable now. Cooked mushrooms and sauteed chicken livers alone make a coherent garnish; nothing is lost but the period silhouette.
- TrufflesTen whole truffles plus chopped truffle in two components is a Victorian luxury cost that few will meet. Preserved truffle peelings in the forcemeat and rice, with a small amount of good truffle oil finishing the sauce, gets the flavour; the whole truffles between the timbales can simply be omitted.
- ChablisThe wine is listed as an ingredient because the whole truffles are simmered in it, and it is the wine the book pairs with the dish. Any dry, unoaked white will poach the truffles; keep the good bottle for the table.
- Sauce supreme and yieldSauce supreme is a veloute of white poultry stock finished with cream, and the ten timbales suggest the intended scale: probably eight to ten as part of a longer meal. Make the sauce with the capon's own poaching stock, reduced hard first.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) presented itself as a book of Italian cookery for English readers, but dishes like this one show how thoroughly the grand Italian table of the period had absorbed French technique - the forcemeat, the sauce supreme, the timbale garnish and the platter architecture all belong to the classical French repertoire codified by Careme and carried on by Escoffier's generation. Capon itself is much older: caponising was practised in the ancient Mediterranean, and the birds were prized through the medieval and early modern centuries as the finest poultry available, reserved for feast days and grand service. The style of presentation here, with the bird set on a dish and ringed by moulded rice and whole truffles, is a showpiece platter of the kind grand service favoured - the garnish exists to be looked at as the platter comes to the table, and the sauce is passed separately so the arrangement is not disturbed.