Carolyn Nadeau’s translation of Francisco Martinez Montino’s, The Art of Cooking, Pie Making, Pastry Making, and Preserving: 1611

page 189

Translation:

Another Stuffed Capon

Prepare a capon for stuffing, chop off the neck and feet. The stuffing should be made out of veal or kid and don’t sear it in a frying pan. Instead mince the raw meat with the right amount of fatback, eggs, and spices as you would for meatballs. Add in bits of beef marrow and hard-boiled egg yolk. And if you’d like to add pine nuts, that would also be good. Put the stuffing between the skin and flesh and in the cavity. Put it on to cook. Then make some pinwheels with leftover stuffing from another capon. Add chopped egg yolks and cook the pinwheels in a covered tart pan. When the capon and the pinwheels are done make sops from milk bread or from the whitest bread you have and soak it just with broth. When it has become very spongy, set the capon on it so that the bird is half way buried in it. The make some slits in the breast and place the pinwheels in those slits and the remaining ones around the capon. Sprinkle on top some lemon or orange juice and add some fried poultry liver or some veal or kid sweet breads. If you want to garnish with lemon wheels you can, but first remove the peel so it won’t be too bitter. To avoid using two capons, you can take some of the breast meat from the same capon to make the pinwheels.

Redaction:

Rinse a small chicken (2 ½ lb) and pat dry. Reserve liver.

Prepare stuffing as follows:

Mix ground goat (kid) meat (1/2 lb) with chopped bacon, egg, ¼ tsp salt and 1 tsp Francisco’s spice mix*. Add diced butter (2 Tb), hard boiled egg yolk, and pine nuts (2 Tb).

Carefully separate the skin from the meat along the breasts and put some stuffing mixture in there.

Put most of remaining stuffing in the cavity. Tie the legs together to hold in the stuffing.

Save off one cup of stuffing for the pinwheels.

Sprinkle salt on the chicken and then baste with lemon juice.

Scrub a lemon to remove the outer layer of peel then slice as thinly as possible. Place the lemon wheels on the chicken.

Roast the bird; 20 min per pound at 350.

Make dough for the pinwheels and roll out into a rectangle. (I used 2 empanada skins left over from another project.)

Add chopped hard boiled egg yolk to the stuffing mixture.

Spread mixture on the dough and roll tightly.

Wrap the cylinder in aluminum foil to hold its shape. Put the roll on a pan and bake … 350 for 30 minutes.

Line a serving platter with very soft bread (like brioche) and pour any juices from the roasting pan from the chicken over the bread.

Nestle the chicken into the bread on the platter.

Slice the pinwheel cylinders so they are about the size of cookies.

Cut slits into the chicken breast and insert pinwheels.

Arrange remaining pinwheels on the platter around the chicken.

Fry the reserved chicken liver, chop and sprinkle them on and around the chicken.

*Francisco's spice mix is 4 parts black pepper, 4 parts ginger, 2 parts nutmeg, 1 part cloves, and a bit of saffron.

Since I’m just feeding two people, I used a small chicken

I substitute butter for beef marrow. Both are tasty animal fats, but butter is cheaper and easier to find.