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Guinea Hens, En Casserole, with Cream
Cut head and feet from two tender guinea hens. Neatly draw, wipe and truss. Cover breasts with thin slices larding pork. Place in an earthen casserole, baste with a little melted butter, then set in oven forty minutes, turning once in a while. Remove, lift up the lard, untruss, remove all fat from the pan.
Prepare a cream sauce, adding to it one gill cream; mix well, pour sauce over birds in the pan, place pan on range, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg and one saltspoon ground allspice. Lightly mix, boil ten minutes, remove and serve in same pan.
A straightforward barded roast finished in sauce, written for a cook who already knows what a cream sauce is and owns an earthenware pot. Two points need attention: the oven temperature is never stated, and neither is the sauce recipe.
- Oven heatThe original never says. Forty minutes suggests a fairly hot oven; something in the 400-425F range is a reasonable modern guess rather than the book's instruction. Dressed guinea hens run roughly 2 to 3 lb, so go by a thigh reading of 165F rather than the clock.
- "En casserole" means the potIn Filippini's day a casserole was an earthenware or enamelled vessel used on the range as well as in the oven, rather than a baked dish; here the recipe calls for an earthen one and mentions no lid. Any heavy Dutch oven or oven-safe braiser that can then go back on the burner does the job, since the recipe explicitly moves the pan to the range for the finish.
- Larding porkThis is fatback or unsmoked salt pork, sliced thin and laid over the breasts to keep them from drying. Unsmoked pork fatback is closest; thin-sliced pancetta works. Bacon will push the dish smoky, which is not the intention.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. It goes into the cream sauce in addition to whatever milk or cream the sauce already contains, thinning and enriching it.
- The cream sauceThe recipe assumes you already have a cream sauce and gives no formula. A standard white sauce serves: about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour cooked to a white roux, moistened with milk or light cream, roughly 1 1/2 cups finished sauce for two birds. Season it lightly, since the spicing comes afterward.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning works out to roughly 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg and 1/4 teaspoon allspice with the 1/2 teaspoon salt. The cayenne is assertive by modern standards; halve it if that matters to you.
- The ten-minute boilTen minutes at a hard boil risks over-reducing or scorching the sauce and drying the birds further. Bring it barely to a simmer, spoon it over the hens and hold it there about five minutes to marry the spices.
- Drawing and trussingBirds now arrive drawn and with head and feet removed. Truss simply, and remember to cut the strings before saucing, as the recipe directs.
- YieldTwo guinea hens serve four generously, or three if the birds are on the small side. Serve straight from the pot, as written, with rice or plain boiled potatoes to take the sauce.
Guinea fowl is an African bird, domesticated in antiquity and known to the Romans as the gallina numidica, that reached American farmyards mainly as a semi-wild yard bird kept as much for its shrieking alarm call as for the table. Its flesh is leaner and gamier than chicken, which is exactly why the breasts are barded with pork fat here and why the finish is cream rather than pan juices. Alexander Filippini is long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reflects a professional kitchen's habit of treating a modestly game-flavoured bird with French technique: bard, roast, degrease, sauce, serve in the cooking vessel. The nutmeg-and-allspice seasoning looks like a survival of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and French taste for warm spice with poultry.