Home › Poultry and Game Recipes › Guinea Fowl En Casserole
Guinea Fowl En Casserole
I large guinea fowl I onion 4 tablespoonfuls cream A bunch herbs 2 celery stalks 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) flour 1/2 pint (1 cup) white stock I blade mace 6 whole peppers 2 slices carrot 1/2 pint (I cup) milk Salt and pepper Draw and truss the guinea fowl; then put it into a casserole with sufficient hot water to cover, then bring to the boil, and simmer gently until the bird is cooked. Take it up and let it cool.
Measure half a pint of the water the guinea fowl
A late-Victorian/Edwardian pot-poached bird finished in a mace-scented white sauce. The text breaks off mid-sentence, so the last third has to be reconstructed from the ingredient list.
- The casserole is the potHere it is plainly a lidded pot used on the stove rather than a shallow baking dish: the bird goes in with water to cover, is brought to the boil and simmered. Any heavy Dutch oven that will hold the bird and enough water to cover works.
- What the missing ending intendedWhat the missing ending probably intended -- the list reads as a standard 2 oz butter, 2 oz flour, 1 cup liquid, 1 cup milk white sauce infused with onion, celery, carrot, mace, peppercorns and herbs, strained, enriched with 4 tablespoons cream and poured over the bird. The half pint of cooking water the surviving text tells you to measure was most likely meant to serve as the white stock, though the list names the two separately.
- UnitsThe author glosses 1/2 pint as 1 cup, which points to the American pint of 16 fl oz rather than the Imperial pint of 20; treat both the stock and the milk as about 8 fl oz each. Two heaping tablespoonfuls is given as 2 oz, so weigh rather than spoon.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a blade is one dried piece. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace is the usual substitute, added to the sauce rather than steeped.
- Guinea fowl timingA 2 to 2 1/2 lb bird poaches in roughly 45 to 60 minutes at a bare simmer; the leg joint should move freely and the thigh read 165F. Guinea is leaner than chicken and turns dry and stringy if held at a rolling boil.
- Do not let the bird cool in nothingThe instruction to take it up and let it cool is for ease of carving. Keep it loosely covered with a little of the hot broth spooned over, or the breast dries out before the sauce is made.
- ReheatingOnce sauced, the dish only needs to be brought back to a gentle heat; the cream should not boil. If you want a browned surface, a few minutes under a hot broiler is enough.
- YieldOne large guinea fowl serves three to four. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or buttered noodles carry the sauce.
Guinea fowl (Numida meleagris) is a West African bird that reached Europe by way of the Guinea coast trade, which is where the English name comes from; it had been kept on European farms since the sixteenth century and was a familiar poultry-yard bird in Britain and America by the time this book was written. Its dark, gamey, close-grained flesh sets it apart from plain fowl, and its leanness explains the treatment here: poached slowly in water instead of roasted, then covered in a butter-and-flour sauce enriched with milk and cream. The mace, whole peppercorns and bunch of herbs are the standard aromatics of an English white sauce of the period, a milk-based formula infused with spice that is the ancestor of béamel. Casserole cookery was being actively promoted in the 1900s as economical and unattended.