No. 2624

Capon Salad a la Mortimer

Salade de Chapon a la Mortimer

Have a cold roast capon, cut off the thighs and the breasts; suppress all the skin, fat and bones. Divide the meat into slices three-sixteenths of an inch thick, and these into round pieces an inch in diameter; lay them in a deep dish, and season with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar and mustard. Now put into a salad bowl half a pound of salted cucumbers, half a pound of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of minced red radishes, a quarter of a pound of celery or celery knob, all being minced up very fine; season with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, chopped chervil and tarragon, and mix thoroughly. Cut into eight pieces sufficient artichoke bottoms to form a border, dip the tips of each piece into finely chopped parsley. Prepare rounds of truffles one inch in diameter by one-eighth of an inch in thickness; arrange the vegetables at the bottom of a cold dish, lay the capon on top, cover with a mayonnaise sauce (No. 606), and surround the whole with the artichoke bottoms; inside this border lay symmetrically the slices of truffles, and inside of these slices of beetroot cut smaller than the truffles, and on top of the beets smaller bits of gherkin; finish the center with a small cluster of truffles. Send this salad to the table to show the guests before removing it to stir and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed salad from Ranhofer's Delmonico kitchen, built to be looked at before it is eaten. The assembly matters more than the cooking, so read the layering order once through before you start slicing.

CaponA capon is a castrated cockerel, fattened for tender, well-marbled meat; a few specialty butchers still carry them at holidays. A roasted 4-5 lb chicken, cooled completely, gives the same result. Roast it the day before so the meat firms up and slices cleanly.
Salted cucumbersThese are brined cucumbers, not sweet vinegar pickles. Use half-sour or full-sour deli pickles, drained and patted dry, or the salted cucumbers sold in Eastern European groceries.
Celery knobCeleriac. Peel heavily, cut into fine dice or julienne, and either use it raw for crunch or blanch it two minutes and cool. The book offers it as a straight alternative to celery stalks.
PotatoesThe recipe does not say, but a salad of this kind takes cooked potato. Boil waxy potatoes in their skins, peel while warm, cool, then dice fine. Half a pound is roughly two medium potatoes.
Weights into volumeThe vegetable measures are given by weight: 8 oz pickles, 8 oz potato, 4 oz radish, 4 oz celery or celeriac. That is about a pound and a half of minced vegetable, roughly four to five cups, and it forms the base layer of the dish.
Artichoke bottomsFresh ones mean trimming globe artichokes down to the fleshy base and cooking them in acidulated water. Jarred or frozen artichoke bottoms, drained and halved, work for a border; the quartered hearts sold in oil are too soft and too sharply marinated.
TrufflesRanhofer used them as garnish coins, purely visual. Black truffle at current prices makes this the most expensive element on the plate; thin rounds of cooked black olive, or simply more beetroot, keep the pattern without the outlay.
The mayonnaiseNo. 606 is a hand-made mayonnaise, thick enough to coat and hold its shape over the meat. A stiff commercial mayonnaise loosened with a little vinegar and mustard will sit correctly; a thin dressing will run into the vegetable layer and ruin the tiers.
ServingThe dish is presented intact, then taken away and tossed, so build it on something shallow and wide. The recipe gives no yield; on these quantities it would stretch to six or eight as a first course. Keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes out, since dressed cold poultry under mayonnaise should not sit at room temperature.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of the food he cooked across roughly three decades — with an interruption in the 1870s — as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its cooked-salad chapter shows the house style at its most architectural: layers built in a mold-like border, garnished in concentric rings of truffle, beetroot and gherkin, carried to the table for inspection and only then broken up and served. Many of the book's dishes carry the name of a patron, a public figure or an occasion, and "a la Mortimer" may belong to that habit; the Mortimers were a prominent old New York family, but nothing in the book identifies the dedicatee. The dish also suits the practical reality of a large restaurant kitchen — cold roast capon reappearing as a showpiece, its trimmed white meat cut into uniform coins so that nothing looks like a leftover.