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Guinea-Fowl, Boiled, with Oysters
Clean the fowl, and put about two dozen oysters inside it, with an ounce of butter, and a pinch of salt and pepper; truss it firmly. Put it into a close-fitting jar, and cover with stock; stand the jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and boil fast for two hours. When the fowl is cooked drain it from the liquor, and cover it with white sauce, or parsley and butter sauce.
A Victorian bain-marie method: the bird cooks inside a covered jar set in boiling water, so it never touches the water and keeps its juices. The technique is sound; the timing belongs to a much larger, tougher bird than you will buy today.
- The jar must not be sealedUse a heatproof stoneware or glass jar, a pudding basin, or a lidded casserole that sits inside a deep pan. Cover it loosely with a lid or foil rather than screwing down a canning ring, since a genuinely airtight vessel in boiling water can build pressure and crack. Water in the outer pan should come at least two-thirds up the sides and be topped up as it evaporates.
- Two hours is too longA modern guinea fowl runs 2 to 3 lb and will be cooked through in about 1 to 1 1/4 hours by this gentle method. Go by temperature: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh. The long original timing may reflect an older, tougher bird than the one you will buy today.
- The oysters are seasoning, not a garnishTwo dozen oysters cooked for the full time will be firm and shrunken; they perfume the bird and enrich the liquor from inside. If you want oysters worth eating on the plate, poach a few separately for two minutes in the strained cooking liquor and add them to the sauce at the end.
- Guinea fowl and its substitutesGuinea fowl is available from good butchers and online game suppliers, and is leaner and slightly gamier than chicken. A 3 lb free-range chicken behaves the same way in this recipe; a poussin or two will take about 35 minutes.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. It melts into the oyster liquor and bastes the cavity from within, so do not skip it — there is no fat rendering onto the bird from outside as there would be in roasting.
- Stock, and how muchEnough to cover the bird in the jar; the quantity depends on how closely the jar fits the bird, and it may take rather more than a quart. Because little is lost to evaporation and nothing is added by the water bath, the liquor comes out clean and strongly flavoured; strain it and use it to loosen the white sauce rather than relying on milk alone.
- Trussing matters hereThe bird is submerged, so anything loose will float free and the oysters will escape. Tie the legs tightly together and pin or sew the vent shut.
- Parsley and butter sauceTraditionally a butter sauce, melted butter lightly thickened with flour and loosened here with the cooking liquor, with a generous handful of chopped parsley stirred in off the heat. Add the parsley at the last moment or it turns drab.
- YieldServes three to four. Boiled fowl was often sent to table whole and carved at the sideboard, with the sauce in a boat alongside.
Boiling a bird inside a closed jar standing in water was one method known to nineteenth-century English kitchens, used for invalid cookery and for delicate birds alike, on the reasoning that nothing of the flavour could leach away into the pot — the same logic that sells sous-vide circulators now. Oysters as a stuffing look extravagant today but were a commonplace economy in Victorian Britain, when oysters were cheap enough to be sold by the barrel to working households; they turn up inside boiled fowl, in beefsteak pudding and in sausages throughout Cassell's. Guinea fowl, an African bird generally traced in Europe to Portuguese traders of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sat awkwardly between poultry and game in the period's classification, and a dictionary of cookery gives it recipes of both kinds; boiled and sauced was the treatment for a bird whose lean flesh dries quickly under a spit.