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Roast Guinea Fowl
Clean, singe, draw and truss in the same way as for roasting chicken. Stuff if desired. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Lay very thin slices of fat salt pork over the breast, wings and legs. Place in a covered roasting pan, pour in one-half cup water, set in oven and roast from forty-five minutes to one hour (continue cooking if liked well done), turning so as to brown evenly. (When the roasting pan is used there need be no basting.) If roasted in an open dripping-pan, baste every ten to fifteen minutes. The flesh of this bird is dry and is therefore best cooked rare. Serve as roast chicken. Prepare sauce same as Giblet Sauce. (See Page 154.)
A straightforward barded roast from an era when the bird arrived whole and feathered. The gaps a modern cook has to fill are the oven temperature, the doneness, and the bird itself.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, as the range would have been judged by hand. A hot oven, 400-425F, suits a bird this small; the covered pan keeps it from drying before it colours.
- The birdA guinea fowl commonly runs about 2 to 3 lb dressed and feeds two, three at a stretch. Most are sold cleaned and ready; "singe" refers to burning off residual hair and pinfeathers over a flame, still worth doing if you find any.
- Fat salt porkSliced paper-thin and laid over the breast, this is barding. Substitute unsmoked streaky bacon or thin sheets of fatback, and hold the salt in your seasoning accordingly.
- DonenessThe advice to cook guinea fowl rare predates modern guidance on poultry-borne pathogens. Cook it as you would chicken, to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, and rely on the barding and the covered pan rather than undercooking to keep it moist.
- Covered pan versus dripping-panA "covered roasting pan" is a lidded roaster, which steams as much as it roasts, hence the half cup of water and no basting. If you want crisp skin, lift the lid and remove the pork for the last 10 to 15 minutes.
- RestingNo mention of it here, but 10 minutes under loose foil before carving makes a real difference on a lean bird.
- Giblet sauceThe cross-reference is to a separate page not reproduced here. A giblet sauce of this period is typically the neck, heart and gizzard simmered with an onion until tender, the stock thickened with the pan drippings and flour, and the chopped giblets returned to it.
The guinea fowl is an African bird, domesticated in antiquity and known to the Romans as the Numidian or Carthaginian hen; it is generally thought to have reached the Americas in the course of the Atlantic slave trade, and it settled comfortably into farmyards, where its noise made it a serviceable watchdog as well as a table bird. Because it is lean, dark-fleshed and faintly gamey, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks often filed it between chicken and game, giving it the barding and the giblet sauce a partridge would get rather than the plain roasting of a fowl. The directions assume the reader has already learned to truss a chicken elsewhere in the book.