crapaudines

Noun

crapaudine (countable and uncountable, plural crapaudines)

1. A method of preparing fowl and poultry, where the back is split apart and the bird is flattened down the breast, looking somewhat like a toad; spatchcock.
   • “Chicken cutlets,” said she, “or crapaudine, and some serniki — only let them be as good as they were last night.1861, Lady Charlotte Pepys, Domestic Sketches in Russia - Volume 1, page 71
2. A type of piquant sauce flavored with tarragon, lemon or vinegar, and other spices, that is traditionally served with a fowl cooked in the crapaudine style.
   • Spring chickens singed, split, washed, backbone andd breastbone removed, trussed out like a frog, seasoned with salt and peper, rolled in olive oil, broiled well done ; served on toast with crapaudine sauce poured around, garnished with parsley and lemon.1904, Charles Fellows, The Culinary Handbook, page 49
3. A form of torture in which the hands and feet are tied together behind the back, forcing the victim's body to bow, and sometimes accompanied by additional forms of torture, such as suspending the body by the point where the hands and feet are tied or beating.
   • A few years ago Herr von Rader and his companions would have been sentenced to quite a curious kind of punishment which was at that time considered in the Foreign Legion to be a radical cure for deserters — a kind of mediaeval torture which, by the way, was not kept for deserters solely, but came...1910, Erwin Rosen, In the Foreign Legion, page 228
4. (obsolete) An ulcer on the coronet of a horse, sheep, or donkey.
   • The morbid principle is eliminated without apparent disturbance, and is fixed in a more or less apparent manner on the surface of the skin, or in certain cavities which have external openings. I this category are included glanders, farey, scrofula, lupus, canker of horses' feet, (crapaudine,)...1871, Horace Capron, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture on the Diseases of Cattle in the United States, page 131
5. A toadstone.
   • A HORN RING, very massive, with a silver bezel, set with a crapaudine, XIVth Century. It was found near Richmond, in Yorkshire.1863, A Catalogue of the Antiquities and Works of Art Exhibited at Ironmongers' Hall, May, 1861
6. A device for calibrating a pendulum consisting of a dilatable plate that produces an artificial tilt of a clinometer.
   • This is accomplished by a device patterned after the crapaudine (Verbaandert & Melchior 1958) used to calibrate horizontal pendulums.1973, DR Bower, “A sensitive water-level tiltmeter”, in Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society

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