ISSUE 39, FOWLS, Part 1: Capon
Capon
We tend to think that fried chicken enjoyed a universal popularity throughout the 19th-century South. Originally associated with Virginia, it spread as a food, and with it the cult of devotion to it. Yet in certain places—Charleston and Savannah for instance—chicken was definitely ranked second as a savory fowl behind capon. If a caterer had a major public banquet, he or she would choose capon over chicken.
Castrating male animals became a method of managing their violent sexual drives and behaviors in domestic enclosures. A capon was an emasculated chicken. A capon to a cockerel is like a steer is to a bull, a barrow to a boar, or a whether to a ram. The capon does not fight like a cock or crow like a rooster. As with all male mammals, castration occasions physiological alterations. In a capon the comb and wattles don’t enlongate. The makes the head seems smaller. Certain of the feathers on the fowl’s saddle elaborate gorgeously. Compared to the cockerel, the capon’s body fattens, and the texture of the flesh is less stringy and muscular. Consequently it commands a greater price per pound than roosters or hens. Bigger, pricier, easier to maintain in groups in a chicken yard, the capon became established as a money making bird in areas where someone could perform the operation.
I recall an animal rights activist telling me that farmers performed barbarous cruelties on male birds, ripping out their reproductive organs by hand in the chicken yard. But that was simply a lurid imagination and heated convictions at work. The castration was performed by an incision made between the two ribs closest the hind legs. A young cockerel (about the size of a quail was optimal) was laid across a barrelhead, feet constrained in a loop of twine and head in another. It takes a steady hand, some anatomical knowledge and usually an assistant holding the animal steady. The Chinese performed caponizing two millennia ago, and the Greeks and Romans did as well. The French during the 19th century were the greatest modern devotees of the capon, and it is French culinary example that influenced Charleston and Savannah.
Only certain breeds lent themselves to caponizing. There was a decided aesthetic preference for varieties with yellow feet and skin. The Cochin, Plymouth Rock, and Wyandotte were the heritage breed varieties most favored in the industry. Curiously, in a chicken-raising region such as the South, caponing birds was a relatively rare practice. When Nat Fuller put it on the menu of his society banquets in 1850s Charleston, he secured the meat from the New York Game market. Periodically an agronomist would write a newspaper article, such as “Easy Operation Makes Good Meat; Caponizing is strongly Neglected in this Section” (The State, Columbia SC, August 11, 1913, 6).