No. 1825

Capon a la Regence

Chapon a la Regence

Singe, draw, and remove the breast bones from two capons; fill the breasts with seasoned butter, then truss as for an entree (No. 178); lard the breasts with fine lardons (No. 3, Fig. 52), and cover the unlarded parts with slices of fat pork. Put the capons in a covered braziere (Fig. 134), and moisten them with mirepoix (No. 419), to a little above their wings; cover over with buttered paper, and leave to simmer slowly for one hour. Uncover the braziere, take off the paper, and glaze all the larded parts. Have four larded sweetbreads, ten large truffles, twelve fine cocks'-combs, and eight big crawfish. Make a garnishing with chicken quenelles and mushrooms, combining these with some regence sauce (No. 532). Cut a piece of bread-crumb ten and a half inches long by four and a quarter wide, and three and a half inches high, it to be conical-formed; fry this, then attach it to the center of a dish with repere paste (No. 142), so that it can support the two capons; have these well drained and arrange them to rest against the bread, the rump parts uppermost. Pour the prepared garnishing into the bottom of the dish; place two large sweetbreads below the two breasts, and two more in the middle intersections, then two crawfish on each side of the sweetbreads; glaze the sweetbreads and the larded parts of the capon and serve with a regence sauce apart. Make six hatelets with the cocks'-combs and the truffles (Fig. 11), and fasten them in tastefully.

← No. 1824 Capon a la Pondichery Capon & Pullet No. 1826 Capon Legs with Truffles, Roast Capon →

For the Modern Kitchen

A full-dress grosse pièce from Ranhofer's Delmonico kitchen: two braised capons propped on a fried bread socle and buried in garnish. Almost every element is a cross-reference to another number in the book, so the work is in assembling the parts rather than in the cooking itself.

The hinge: braise low, but check the temperatureOne hour of slow simmering will not reliably bring two large birds to a safe interior; Ranhofer assumed a cook who could judge a bird by feel. Braise gently until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F, then uncover and glaze.
CaponA castrated young rooster, fattier and more tender than a hen, and generally larger than the birds sold as roasters today. They are less commonly stocked now; two 4-5 lb roasting chickens behave much the same, though they will cook faster.
Mirepoix, No. 419Not the modern diced vegetable base. In The Epicurean this is a braising preparation of diced vegetables and ham cooked in butter and moistened with wine and stock, used as the cooking liquid. Any well-made white braising stock with aromatics and a glass of Madeira stands in.
Larding and the fat porkFine lardons drawn through the breast with a larding needle, and sheets of fatback over the rest, do what a modern cook does with barding fat or simply with a covered pan. Salt pork blanched briefly is the closest current substitute for the fat pork slices.
Regence sauce, No. 532An allemande or supreme enriched with truffle essence, mushroom cooking liquor and wine. Where the base is an allemande it is bound with egg yolk, so it should not be allowed to boil once bound, or it will break.
Sweetbreads and cocks' combsSweetbreads need soaking, blanching and pressing before they are larded. Cocks' combs are a specialty item now, obtainable only by order; the dish reads perfectly well with the combs omitted and the truffles alone on the skewers.
HateletsOrnamental skewers, threaded with truffle and comb and stuck into the assembled piece for height. The skewer itself is decorative and is lifted out before carving, though what is threaded on it is edible.
The bread socleA conical block of crumb roughly 10.5 by 4.25 by 3.5 inches, fried and cemented to the platter with repere — a stiff flour-and-egg-white paste used purely as glue. It is a structural support, not eaten.
YieldTwo capons with this weight of garnish would serve a large formal table, though the book gives no number.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and dishes like this one show what a nineteenth-century American restaurant meant by a service course: not a plate but a built object, assembled on a socle, skewered with hatelets and set down whole. The name points to the Regence, the period of Philippe d'Orleans's regency for the young Louis XV (1715-23), a byword in French cooking for extravagance; by the nineteenth century a la regence had come to denote a garnish built on truffles, quenelles, cocks' combs and sweetbreads, and Ranhofer follows that pattern here. The capon was a prestige bird of the era, and it becomes far less common in American cookbooks over the following century as the fast-growing broiler chicken takes over.