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Roast Capon Stuffed with Rice

A whole capon stuffed with seasoned rice, roasted and served with bacon and watercress, accompanied by velouté sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Capon Stuffed with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Draw, singe, and wash the capon, then wipe it dry.

  2. Boil the rice in stock until cooked, then season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and herbs.

Stuff and roast

  1. Stuff the capon with the rice mixture, truss it, and cover the breast with bacon, tying it with string.

  2. Roast the capon, basting it regularly.

  3. When nearly done, remove the bacon and brown the breast.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with watercress and Velouté sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Nutmeg + watercresstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Capon
Provides the main meat, which stays moist when basted during roasting.
Rice
Cooked in stock, it fills the cavity and absorbs flavour while adding body to the stuffing.
Stock
Cooks the rice and carries flavour into it, so the stuffing is seasoned throughout.
Bacon strips
Laid over the breast, it bastes the meat with fat and helps keep it moist.

The step that matters

Remove the bacon and brown the breast. Bacon shields the breast while the bird cooks. Removing it near the end lets the skin brown and crisp, since browning depends on dry surface heat and the Maillard reaction.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, pepper, watercress, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, pepper, watercress, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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