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Guinea-Fowl Soup
Take the remains of a cold roasted guinea-fowl. Pick off all the meat, and put the bones, skin, trimmings, and forcemeat into a saucepan, with two quarts of stock, a slice of uncooked lean ham, an onion, and a salt-spoonful of bruised celery-seed, tied in muslin, or the outer sticks of celery, preserved for flavouring. Simmer gently for two hours. Pound the meat in a mortar, with a tea-spoonful of salt and half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and the eighth of a nutmeg, grated. Strain the soup, and return it to the saucepan. Add the pounded meat, and a heaped table-spoonful of ground rice, mixed smoothly with a little cold water. Boil twenty minutes longer, and serve with sippets of toast sent to table with the soup. Probable cost, 4s., exclusive of the stock and meat. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A classic Victorian use for a roast carcass: the bones make the broth, the picked meat is pounded back into it as a thickener. A few conventions need translating.
- Guinea-fowlSold by good butchers and some supermarkets, usually 2-2.5 lb dressed and darker and drier than chicken. A roast pheasant or a small free-range chicken carcass substitutes without changing the method.
- Two quarts of stockImperial quarts, so about 2.3 litres or a shade under 10 US cups. Expect some reduction over the two-hour simmer.
- Uncooked lean hamA slice of raw gammon or unsmoked bacon, or a scrap of prosciutto. It is there for salt and depth, so hold back on seasoning until the soup is strained and tasted.
- Salt-spoon and forcemeatA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. The forcemeat is the stuffing from the original roast, which carries herbs and fat into the broth; if the bird was roasted plain, add a bay leaf and a few peppercorns instead.
- Pounding the meatA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar does in ten minutes. Pulse the meat with a ladle of the strained hot broth to a coarse purée rather than grinding it dry, which turns it to paste.
- Ground riceRaw rice milled to a meal, not ground cooked rice; rice flour is the nearest modern equivalent, though it is finer. Slake it in cold water first, as directed, or it will lump the moment it hits the hot liquid.
- The final boilTwenty minutes is for cooking out the raw starch. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir the bottom; a thickened soup with meat solids in it scorches easily on a modern flat burner.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of toasted or fried bread, handed round separately so they stay crisp. Yield is four to five as a first course.
Cassell's belongs to a long tradition of second-day cookery, in which the carcass of a roast is treated as an asset rather than a scrap: the bones give the stock, the picked meat gives body, and nothing beyond the ham and the rice is bought new. Guinea-fowl, native to Africa and known in Europe from antiquity, though its keeping in Britain dates largely from the early modern period, was a familiar farmyard and game-dealer bird in nineteenth-century Britain, and often roasted like a small chicken. Thickening with pounded meat rather than a flour roux marks this as a puree-style soup in the older English manner, and ground rice was a popular thickener of the period because it gave a smooth body without the flavour of cooked flour. The costing in shillings, appended as it is to nearly every entry in the book, is a reminder that these dictionaries were written for household managers who had to answer to a budget as much as to a table.