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Fowl, Guinea, to Roast
This bird improves in flavour by hanging. Prepare and roast like a turkey; the head is sometimes left on, and the breast larded. Serve with gravy and bread-sauce in a tureen. Time, three-quarters to one hour, according to size. Sufficient for four persons.
A terse Victorian entry that assumes you already know how to roast a turkey. Guinea fowl is much leaner and smaller than either turkey or chicken, and that lean breast is the whole problem to solve.
- Larding is not optionalThe breast of a guinea fowl has very little fat and dries out faster than chicken. Cassell's "sometimes larded" should be read as always: bard the breast with streaky bacon or fat pork, or butter it heavily and cover with foil for the first two-thirds of cooking.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Roast at 400F (200C) for a bird of about 2-3 lb, or start at 425F for fifteen minutes to colour the skin and drop to 375F for the remainder.
- Time and donenessThree-quarters to one hour is about right for a 2-2.5 lb bird, but go by temperature rather than clock: 165F (74C) in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Rest fifteen minutes before carving.
- HangingGame birds were hung in a cool larder to tenderise and develop flavour. Modern guinea fowl is sold oven-ready and farmed; if you want a hung bird, buy it that way from a game dealer. Do not hang poultry at room temperature at home.
- The headHeads were often left on birds at table, and the usual explanation is that it identified the bird, a plucked guinea fowl being not unlike a small chicken. Birds sold today come without it and nothing is lost.
- Bread sauceThe standard accompaniment: milk infused with an onion stuck with cloves, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter and a little cream. Serve it separately, as the recipe says, so the crisp skin stays crisp.
- GravyRoast gravy of this period usually meant pan juices let down with stock rather than a thickened sauce. Giblets simmered while the bird roasts will make the stock, though the recipe does not say so.
- Yield"Sufficient for four" is optimistic by modern portions. A single 2-2.5 lb guinea fowl serves two generously or three at a stretch; roast two birds for four people.
The guinea fowl is a West African bird, domesticated in antiquity and known to Greek and Roman cooks before largely disappearing from European tables and returning with Portuguese contact with the Guinea coast in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is the standard explanation of the "guinea" in the name. By the time Cassell's was compiled in late-Victorian Britain the bird occupied an odd middle ground: farmyard-reared, and therefore poultry, but with dark, faintly gamey flesh that cooks treated by the rules of game, hence the note about hanging and the direction to serve bread sauce, which was the traditional partner to roast pheasant and partridge as much as to chicken. The instruction to roast it "like a turkey" is characteristic of the dictionary's method throughout: entries cross-refer rather than repeat, and the reader is expected to own the whole book.