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Cannelons
(Another recipe.) Chop equal parts of cooked chicken and tongue with a spoonful of chopped ham, some cream egg, butter, and herbs, as before. Moisten with sufficient sauce or stock. Roll puff paste very thin, spread evenly with the mixture, and roll like a jelly cake. Lay these on a baking dish, glaze them with yolk of egg, and bake until brown. Serve in same dish.
TRUFFLED CAPON (served in France, Xmas Day.).
Singe, clean, and stuff a fine fat fowl with a forcemeat of 1 pound of truffles, sliced, 2 onions, salt, pepper, a bayleaf, some thyme and a bit of garlic, and 2 pounds of cooked and chopped chestnuts, peeled and boiled in stock. Lard it with bacon and roast it; serve with a cream sauce in which mushrooms and oysters are cooked. An elegant affair but costly.
Two recipes run together here: a rolled puff-paste entrée and a French Christmas capon. Both assume a cook who has already read the preceding pages, so a few of the instructions are shorthand.
- "As before" means the earlier filling methodThe cream, egg, butter and herbs are bound into the chopped meat to make a spreadable forcemeat, not a loose mixture. Aim for something the texture of thick pâté; if it is wet it will steam the pastry from the inside and the roll will collapse.
- TongueCooked ox or beef tongue. Pickled tongue works but will push the salt up sharply when combined with ham; taste before adding any.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll the puff paste to about 1/8 inch, spread the filling to within half an inch of the edges, and roll from the long side. The original leaves out the obvious next step: chill the log firm, then cut it into rounds about an inch thick before baking, or bake whole and slice after. Chilled pastry rises far better.
- Oven for the cannelonsPuff paste wants a hot oven, 425F, dropping to 375F once the pastry has risen and set. "Bake until brown" is roughly 20 to 25 minutes for individual rounds.
- Egg glazeYolk alone gives a deep colour but burns easily; slacken it with a teaspoon of water or cream, and keep it off the cut edges so the layers can still lift.
- CaponA castrated cockerel, larger and fatter than a hen, and not widely stocked now outside butchers and specialist suppliers. A 5 to 6 lb roasting chicken is the practical stand-in; a small turkey is closer in size but drier.
- One pound of trufflesTake this as a period marker rather than a shopping list. A pound of fresh black truffle could run into four figures today, depending on variety and season. A few ounces, or truffled butter worked under the skin, gives the intended perfume at a survivable price.
- Larding versus barding"Lard it with bacon" may mean either threading strips of bacon fat through the flesh with a larding needle, the usual sense in period cookery, or draping and tying fat over the breast. If you bard, remove the fat for the last twenty minutes so the skin colours.
- Roasting and donenessNo temperature or time is given. Roast at 350F and take the bird to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh; a stuffed bird of this size runs to two hours or more, and the chestnut forcemeat must reach that temperature too.
- The oysters in the sauceAdd them at the very end and let them heat only until the edges ruffle, a minute or two. Held in a simmering cream sauce they toughen into rubber and leach liquid that thins the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities for the pastry, so yield is an estimate: a single sheet of puff paste rolled and filled will give roughly eight to ten rounds, enough for four as a first course. A capon of this size would serve six to eight.
Cannelon comes from the French for a small tube or pipe, and by the late nineteenth century the word covered any savoury forcemeat rolled in pastry and baked — a way of turning yesterday's roast chicken and a scrap of tongue into something that could be sent up as an entrée. That is the logic of the whole entrée course in Victorian and Edwardian menus: dishes engineered from cooked meat, bound with sauce and dressed in pastry, sitting between the fish and the joint. The truffled capon tacked on after it belongs to a different world entirely. Truffled poultry was the standard French Christmas and New Year luxury, the bird traditionally trussed with sliced truffle pushed under the skin days ahead so the scent would penetrate the flesh, and capons — cockerels castrated young to fatten more heavily and evenly — were the festive bird of choice long before turkey displaced them in most of Europe. The compiler's closing note, "an elegant affair but costly," is an honest verdict on a dish few readers were likely to attempt.