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Capon, Kabhul
Cut off the neck and feet from a three to three-and-a-half-pound tender capon. Singe, split open through the back, draw and wipe. Remove the breast bone, crack the bones of the second joints with a cleaver; season all around with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper; gently rub it with a tablespoon oil, arrange on a double broiler and slowly broil for twelve minutes on each side. Remove; mix on a plate a tablespoon of good butter, with a half tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, a half light teaspoon Oriental curry powder and spread it all over the capon, then lightly roll it in fresh bread crumbs; replace on the broiler and broil it for five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, decorate with a little watercress and serve with a Tartare sauce separately.
A spatchcocked bird, grilled, then pasted with curry butter and crumbed for a second turn over the fire. The method is sound; the vocabulary and the equipment are what need translating.
- Find a substitute for the caponA capon is a castrated young rooster, fattened for tender, well-marbled flesh, and it is a special-order item at best today. A 3 to 3½ lb young chicken is the practical stand-in and matches the weight the recipe specifies; a pair of poussins will do, though they will come in well under that weight.
- "Split open through the back" is spatchcockingSplit the bird down the back with shears, open it flat, then press to crack the breastbone before removing it. Cracking the second-joint (thigh) bones, as directed, lets the legs lie flat so the whole bird cooks at one thickness.
- Saltspoon measureA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon — assertive but not extreme across a whole bird. Scale it down if your cayenne is fresh and hot.
- The "double broiler"This is a hinged wire grill that clamps the bird between two faces so it can be flipped whole over coals. A modern equivalent is a grill basket over medium coals, or the flat bird weighted under a heavy pan on a grill grate; an overhead oven broiler will also work but the bird must be turned by hand.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwelve minutes a side plus five more is about right over hot coals for a small bird, but heat sources vary. Take the thigh to 165°F on an instant-read thermometer before the crumbing stage is finished, and give it a rest of five minutes.
- Crumb late, and watch itThe curry butter and fresh crumbs go on only for the last five minutes a side because they scorch fast. Keep the bird further from the heat for this stage, or the crumbs will blacken before they toast.
- Curry powder"Oriental curry powder" indicates a bought commercial blend rather than a house mixture; such blends were generally turmeric-based with coriander, cumin, fenugreek and chilli, though the exact make is unknown. Any good all-purpose curry powder serves; bloom it briefly in the butter if you want to lose the raw edge.
- YieldA bird of this size feeds two generously or three modestly, halved or quartered at the table. Tartare sauce, cold, is the intended foil to the curry butter and is worth making rather than buying.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, a sprawling compendium by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, whose habit was to file dishes under geographic or fanciful names. "Kabhul" is a variant spelling of Kabul, and in the kitchens of the period the word may have pointed less to Afghanistan than to a bottled condiment: Sauce Kabul is often said to have been one of several curry-flavoured commercial sauces sold alongside Worcestershire in the late nineteenth century, and "à la Kabul" is traditionally taken to signal a curry-and-Worcestershire seasoning of roughly the sort applied here, though neither point is securely documented. The dish is a good specimen of Anglo-American "curry" as practised in grand hotel kitchens — a spoonful of imported powder worked into butter and used as a finishing paste, with the underlying technique wholly French-Continental. Capon, meanwhile, was a staple of that kind of cooking and would have been unremarkable on a 1906 market stall; its near-disappearance from ordinary retail is one of the clearer measures of how much poultry farming has changed since.