Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (51 page)

To scour and clean the mortar of soft and runny sauces like this one, you can use a large slice of raw potato.

I am going to describe to you a galantine of capon I made at home and served at a luncheon for ten people. But it could have served twenty, since the capon weighed 1.5 kilograms (about 3 pounds) skinned.

Cleaned and boned (to bone a chicken, see recipe 258), the capon weighed 700 grams (about 1-1/2 pounds). It was stuffed with the ingredients described below:

200 grams (about 7 ounces) of lean milk-fed veal

200 grams (about 7 ounces) of lean pork

1/2 of a pullet breast

100 grams of salt pork

80 grams (about 2-2/3 ounces) of salted tongue

40 grams (about 1-1/3 ounces) of untritnmed prosciutto

40 grams (about 1-1/3 ounces) of black truffles

20 grams (about 2/3 of an ounce) of pistachios

If you do not have pork, you can use turkey breast.

Cut the truffles into pieces the size of hazelnuts and blanch the pistachios in hot water. Cut the rest of the ingredients into strips barely as wide as a finger, and set aside; salt the meat.

Finely chop some more pork and veal—200 grams (about 7 ounces) of meat in total—and then grind in a mortar with 60 grams (about 2 ounces) of crustless bread moistened with broth. Add an egg, the skins of the truffles, and the scraps from the tongue and the prosciutto, seasoning with salt and pepper. When everything is thoroughly mashed, pass the mixture through a sieve.

Now spread the capon wide open and salt it lightly. Dab it with a little of the mixture and over it place a layer of meat strips (alternating in each layer the different kinds of meat), and then a few bits of truffle and a few pistachios. Continue in this fashion, a layer of flavoring mixture followed by a layer of meat strips, truffles and pistachios, until you run out of ingredients. Remember that it is better to place the strips of chicken toward the tail of the capon so as not have too much of the same kind of meat at the breast. Once this is done, pull the two sides of the capon together. don’t worry if they don’t come together perfectly, because it doesn’t matter. Then sew it up. Tie it lengthwise with twine and wrap it tightly with a cheesecloth that you have rinsed so as to eliminate the smell of laundry. Finally, tie the two ends of the cheesecloth and put the capon to boil in water for about 2-1/2 hours. Then, untie it, wash out the cloth, wrap the capon in it again, and place it flat with something heavy on top of it. Keep the capon in this position for at least a couple of hours, so that it becomes quite flat.

The water in which you have boiled the capon can be used for broth, or for the aspic described in recipe 3.

People will say that I have the virtue of a jackass—and so be it!— when they hear that after four unsuccessful attempts, I finally succeeded on the fifth and sixth in cooking a capon in a bladder. The first four were sacrificed to Comus, the god of the table: 1 nad not taken all the necessary precautions, and the bladders burst in the boiling water. But it is a dish worth the trouble, since capon, in itself an excellent dish, becomes delicious when cooked in this manner.

Take a large, heavy bladder without any defects; it is best to use a pork rather than a beef bladder, since the former seems to be more heat resistant. Wash it well with lukewarm water and then let it soak for a day or two. Clean the capon, remove the neck and feet, toss a generous handful of salt inside, turn the ends of the legs inward and fold the wings against the body so that the tips of the wings will not puncture the bladder. Then sew up the openings in the rump and neck, and wrap the whole thing in 150 grams (about 5-1/4 ounces) of trimmed prosciutto sliced very thin, tying the slices so that they adhere to the capon. Once the capon has been dressed in this manner, make an incision in the bladder just big enough for the capon to be inserted in it. Then place the bird inside and sew it up tightly.

Now take a tube at least as long as your palm. With this you will make a device to let the steam escape as the bird is cooking. Make a spout like a whistle on one end and a notch on the other, which goes into the bladder. Then attach the tube to the neck of the bladder. With this apparatus, put the capon on the fire in a pot of lukewarm water, bring to a boil and let cook for three continuous hours with the tube sticking out. But be careful, because this is the most difficult part: it must boil in such a way that you see only a few small bubbles rise to the surface. If the fat or some other liquid should spurt out of the tube, do not be alarmed; catch it in a small pan. When the capon is cooked, let it cool in the water in which you have boiled it, and serve it the next day, discarding the prosciutto, which will have lost all its flavor. You will find some gelatin inside the
capon, and you can add some aspic if you want to make a nice accompaniment. It will be a cold dish fit for a king. Should you not have a capon, a fattened pullet will do.

I should advise you that I was assured that the last bladder I used was a pig bladder, and that it could withstand the heat better than a cow bladder.

For six thrushes, take:

100 grams (about 3-1/2 ounces) of lean milk-fed veal

40 grams (about 1-1/3 ounces) of salted tongue

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of untrimmed prosciutto

about 30 grams (about 1 ounce) of black truffles

Put aside half of the tongue and a third of the prosciutto (more of the fat than of the lean part). Chop the veal with the rest of the tongue and prosciutto, and then grind in a mortar along with the skin of the truffles, softening the mixture with a drop of Marsala wine. Then pass it through a sieve, adding an egg yolk.

Bone the thrushes as you would the stuffed chicken in recipe 258, leaving the neck and the head attached. Then stuff them with the veal mixture, to which you have added the truffles, as well as the tongue and prosciutto you set aside, all diced. Now tie the thrushes so that the string can be easily removed once they are cooked, wrap each one in cheesecloth, and boil for an hour in the broth for the aspic in recipe 3.

Serve cold, on top of the aspic they have flavored. If you make six little molds with the aspic, the size of birds’ nests, it will look like the thrushes are sitting on their eggs.

The result is an elegant, delicate dish.

In Tuscany, spit- or oven-roasted saddle of pork is called “àrista.” It is usually eaten cold, since it is much better cold than hot. In this
case, pork “saddle” means the piece of the loin with the ribs still attached, which can weigh between 3 and 4 kilograms (between about 6 and 8 pounds).

Stud it with garlic, sprigs of rosemary, and a few cloves, but be parsimonious, because these herbs can come back to haunt you; season with salt and pepper.

Roast it on a spit—the best way—or in the oven without anything else, and use the drippings to brown potatoes or re-heat vegetables.

This is a convenient dish for families, because it keeps for a long time during the winter.

During the Council of 1430, convened in Florence to resolve some differences between the Roman and Greek Churches, this dish, which was known by another name at the time, was served up to the bishops and their entourage. When they found it to their liking, they began to cry “
arista, arista”
(good, good!), and that Greek word continues, four and a half centuries later, to denote saddle of pork cooked in this manner.

Let’s take, for example, a gray partridge or a common partridge and make a pie that will serve six or seven people. The gray partridge (
Perdrix cinerea
) can be distinguished from the common partridge (
Perdrix rubra
) because the latter has red feet and a red beak and is somewhat larger.

These fowl are of the order of
Rasores
. They feed only on plants, particularly grains, and therefore the walls of their gizzards are particularly muscular; they dwell in the mountains of temperate regions. Their meat is excellent and delicate in flavor. But of the two species, the common partridge is preferable.

Here are the ingredients for this pie:

1 gray partridge or 1 common partridge that has hung for some time

3 chicken livers

1 egg yolk

2 bay leaves

2 fingers of Marsala wine

50 grams (about 1-2/3 ounces) of black truffles

50 grams (about 1 -2/3 ounces) of salted tongue

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of untrimmed prosciutto

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of butter

crustless bread, the equivalent in volume of a fist

some chopped onion, carrot, and celery

a little broth

Clean and wash the partridge and put it on the fire with the chopped onion, carrot, and celery, as well as the butter, the prosciutto (cut into thin slices), and the whole bay leaves; season with salt and pepper. When the onion begins to brown, moisten it with the Marsala wine, poured in a little at a time; if this is not enough liquid to cook the partridge halfway, add broth. Take the partridge off the fire, remove the breast and cut it into 8 slices, and put them aside. Cut the rest of the partridge into small pieces and finish cooking them with the chicken livers and the liver from the partridge as well.

When all of this is cooked, strain it and put it in a mortar, discarding the bay leaves. Toss the bread into the liquid that remains in the pan, along with a little broth. Stir to form a mash which you will also pour into the mortar, along with the skin you grated off the truffles. Grind it all well, and then pass through a sieve. Add the egg yolk to the puréed mixture and work it well with a wooden spoon to blend it all together.

Now make the dough to cover the pie, following the instructions in recipe 372. Take one of those round or boat-shaped tinned steel molds with a hoop that can be unlocked made specially for pasticci. Grease the mold with butter, roll the dough out until it is a little thicker than a coin, and line the mold with it. Also make what will be the bottom of the pie, laying it on a copper baking pan greased with butter.

First pour part of the mixture over the bottom of the pie, and on top of this arrange some of the meat slices—the partridge breast and salted tongue—and a few pieces of raw truffle the size of a nut; then add more mixture, topping it again with a layer of slices and truffles, and so on if the pie is bigger. Press all of it down firmly so
that it well packed, and cover it with the same dough, making some decorations. Leave a hole in the middle to let the steam escape.

Brush the outside with egg yolk and bake in the oven or in a Dutch oven. When you remove it from the fire, cover the hole on the top with a bow-shaped piece of dough, made to fit into the space and baked separately.

Using this same recipe, you can make a pie with two woodcocks, which do not need to have the intestines or gizzard removed. Just make sure there is no unpleasant smell coming from their nether parts.

200 grams (about 7 ounces) of lean, milk-fed veal

100 grams (about 3-1/2 ounces) of lean pork

60 grams (about 2 ounces) of butter

60 grams (about 2 ounces) of cooked bam, thickly sliced

50 grams (about 1-2/3 ounces) of salted tongue, thickly sliced

50 grams (about 1-2/3 ounces) of crustless bread

1 chicken breast

1 chicken liver