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Guinea Fowl (Truss and cook as a fowl only)
Truss and cook as a fowl, only tie a slice of bacon on the breast or else lard it. It will take about half an hour to roast. Dish it up on a slice of buttered toast with watercress round. Hand bread sauce and Espagnole sauce.
A note rather than a full recipe, written for a cook who already knows how to roast a chicken. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the internal temperature, and what the two sauces actually are.
- The hinge: guinea fowl dries outThe breast has almost no fat, which is why the bacon or larding is not decoration. Keep it covered for the bulk of the roasting and remove it only for the last five to eight minutes to colour the skin.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature. "Cook as a fowl" implies a fairly brisk roast; something around 400F is the usual modern equivalent. Half an hour suits a bird of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb; larger birds need 40-50 minutes.
- DonenessRoast to 165F in the thickest part of the breast, not the half hour alone. Rest the bird 10 minutes before carving, breast down if you can manage it.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of pork back fat through the flesh with a larding needle. Barding, the simpler option given first here, is just tying fat bacon or thin sheets of pork fat over the breast, and is what most cooks will do.
- The toastThe buttered toast under the bird catches the juices and would usually be eaten with the meat. Cut it to the size of the bird and put it on the dish only at the moment of serving, or it turns to paste.
- Bread sauceMilk infused with onion, clove and a bay leaf, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter and cream. It should be soft and pourable, not stiff.
- EspagnoleThe classic brown sauce, built on a brown roux and a well-reduced brown stock. A good reduced game or veal stock, lightly thickened, serves the same purpose without the day's work.
- YieldOne guinea fowl serves two generously, three at a stretch. Two birds are more practical for a table of four.
Guinea fowl is a West African bird, Numida meleagris, kept by the Romans as the gallina africana or Numidian hen, lost to European tables for centuries, and generally traced back into Europe through Portuguese traders working the Guinea coast in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is where the English name comes from. By the nineteenth century it was a familiar farmyard bird in Britain and France, half poultry and half game in the cook's mind, which suits a bird trussed and roasted like a chicken but handed game accompaniments. The pairing with both bread sauce and Espagnole says the same thing twice over: bread sauce is what you hand with roast fowl and pheasant, Espagnole is the brown sauce of the professional kitchen, and the guinea fowl gets both because it belongs comfortably to neither camp.