Guinea Fowl
to be roasted, must either be larded or barded. Serve it with gravy apart, and bread-sauce.
Time to roast, nearly an hour. As the Guinea fowl is in season from February to June, when game is scarce, it makes a good substitute. The eggs of this bird are very delicate.
GURNARD or GURNET is neither common enough nor interesting enough to deserve much notice. His name means-grunter, from the noise he makes. He is some- Haddock times called cuckoo for the same reason. The ancients called him a lyre, and supposed him to be under the special protection of Apollo. Those who eat him can make a guess what flying fish is like for the flying fish, beloved of poets, is a gurnard. So also are the sticklebacks, which engaged the philosophical mind of Mr. Pickwick.
Stuff him with veal stuffing, and boil him or bake him. But first banish his fins.
ADDOCK is called by the French aigrefin— a sharper, an impostor. It is a very good fish notwithstanding. It has two black spots, one on each shoulder, which are said to be the mark of St. Peter's finger and thumb when he took the tribute-money out of its mouth. People do not adorn a bad fish with these fine legends. Some of the best haddocks come to London from Devonshire and Cornwall; and the Dublin Bay ones are famous. They are very good boiled with plain English butter-sauce; but still better baked, having first been stuffed with oyster forcemeat or with veal stuffing. Also a haddock makes one of the best of curries. But the Scotch are the greatest masters of the haddock. It is their fish par excellence. They have their Loch Fyne herring, it is true-but it has rivals in the Yarmouth bloater and the Dutch herring. There is nothing, however, in the way of haddock that can approach the Rizzared haddock and the Finnan haddock of the Scotch. Nobody who has not been to Scotland in the winter time, or who has not deeply studied the Scotch books, can imagine to what heights of glory a simple haddock can leap up. There will always be doubts about the haggis or a singed sheep's head, but the Scottish treatment of haddock is incontrovertible.
Haddock The Rizzared Haddock of the Waverley Novels. The haddocks (similarly also whitings) are to be skinned and rubbed inside and out with salt. In this courtly powder they are to hang for twenty-four hours; but less time will do. Next morning, for breakfast, take off their heads, rub them with butter, dredge them with a little flour, broil them, and serve them with pats of fresh butter. There are Scotchmen who eat this for breakfast every day of their lives, and it goes far to account for the great reputation of Scotch breakfasts. When an English cook broils a haddock, she neither salts it nor skins it. The last of these faults is fatal. The object of a broil is to get the taste of fire upon the food which is to be eaten the toasted flavour. The broiled flesh of a haddock is delicious; the broiled skin is worthless, and nobody eats it.
Finnan Haddock. - Finnan is a hamlet about six miles from Aberdeen and the humble fishermen of this little straggling hamlet have perhaps done more for the happiness of mankind than all the fast clippers of the port of Aberdeen that scour the seas for a first cargo of tea, or than all the learned professors of King's College and Marischal College. It is kindly ordered that happiness should be the result of very simple arrangements, and not of gigantic efforts. What joyous breakfasts among Scottish hills, what jovial suppers at untimely hours in London streets, have been the result of the Finnan haddock! Well may Sir Walter Scott describe it as incomparable! But see that it be cooked in the Scotch manner—that is, skinned. The Scotch gentlemen dispense with their breeches; the Scotch haddocks dispense with their coats. We must have the nude simplicity of these gentle hyperboreans. English cooks sometimes complain that it is not so easy to skin Finnan haddocks. It is the modesty of the creatures, and there is all the greater reason to make them unrobe. When they have parted with their garments, they are to be Haggis rubbed with butter, broiled, and served with pats of cold fresh butter.
Three birds and fish are treated in this stretch of Kettner's alphabet, but the working instructions come down to roast guinea fowl, a stuffed and boiled or baked gurnard, and the two Scottish haddocks. A few of the entry's confident assertions have not survived.
- Guinea fowl size and heatA dressed guinea fowl runs 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 lb and feeds three. "Nearly an hour" is about right at 400F for a bird that size; take it out when the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F, since the meat is leaner and drier than chicken and punishes overcooking.
- Larding and bardingLarding means threading strips of pork fat through the flesh with a needle; barding means tying a sheet of fat or streaky bacon over the breast. Barding is the practical option now, as larding needles are scarce. Either way the instruction is not decorative -- guinea fowl has almost no fat of its own.
- Gravy apart, and bread sauce"Gravy apart" means a plain roasting-juice gravy served in a boat rather than poured over. Bread sauce is milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with fresh crumbs and finished with butter; make it while the bird rests.
- The gurnard's relativesThe natural history here is wrong. Flying fish and sticklebacks are not gurnards. Gurnard itself is a good, firm, cheap fish that has come back into favour; it fillets well and holds together in stews. The instruction to remove the fins is sound, as they are stiff and spiny.
- Veal stuffingVictorian veal stuffing, also called forcemeat, is breadcrumbs, shredded suet, chopped ham or bacon, lemon zest, parsley, thyme and egg to bind. Ground veal is not usually in it, despite the name. Allow roughly a cupful for a fish of two or three pounds.
- Rizzared haddock, and refrigeration"Rizzared" is Scots for dried or hardened, and the method is a very short dry salt cure. Do the twenty-four hours uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator, not hanging in a warm kitchen; the fish is not smoked and has no preservative beyond surface salt. Rinse and pat dry before buttering.
- Do not salt a Finnan haddockThe Finnan is already cured and cold-smoked, so it needs nothing but skinning, butter and heat. Broil three to four minutes a side under a hot grill until the flesh flakes. Cold-smoked haddock is raw fish and must be cooked through, whatever its colour suggests.
- Skinning the fishThe insistence on skinning is the hinge of both haddock methods, and it is correct: cured haddock skin toughens and tastes of little. Work a thin knife under the skin at the tail with the fish skin-side down, grip the tail with a cloth and pull the flesh away from the blade.
- Colour in smoked haddockMuch supermarket smoked haddock is dyed a uniform bright yellow. Undyed fillets are pale straw and taste of smoke rather than of dye; they are what the entry is describing.
Kettner's Book of the Table appeared in 1877, named for Auguste Kettner, whose Soho restaurant was then a fashionable address, though the writing is generally credited to the journalist E. S. Dallas. Its alphabetical form lets a roasting instruction sit beside a page of opinion, and the haddock entry is opinion at full strength -- the Findon or Finnan haddock, cold-smoked over peat and hard wood in a fishing hamlet south of Aberdeen, had by the 1870s become a national breakfast and a London supper dish, carried south by rail. "Rizzared" comes from the Scots rizzar, to dry in the sun or wind, and describes the older, unsmoked treatment that preceded it. The two black marks behind a haddock's gills are traditionally said to be St Peter's fingerprints, a legend also attached to the John Dory. Guinea fowl earns its place for a practical reason the entry states plainly: it filled the gap between the close of the game season and the summer, at a table where game was the standard of good eating.