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Roast Guinea Fowls
Singe, draw, cut off heads and feet from two small, tender guinea fowls; neatly truss, season equally with a teaspoon salt, a half teaspoon white pepper and two saltspoons ground allspice. Cover the breasts with very thin slices of larding pork. Lay in a roasting pan, pour a half gill of water into the pan, then set in oven to roast for forty minutes, turning and basting once in a while. Remove, dress on a hot dish, untruss, decorate with a little watercress, skim the fat from the gravy, pour over the birds and serve.
A straightforward barded roast that assumes a bird few markets stock and an oven with no dial. The essentials are the fat cap and the doneness check.
- The hinge: keep the fat onGuinea fowl is markedly leaner and drier than chicken, and the breast will be sawdust without the pork. Use thin sheets of fatback, unsmoked salt pork or streaky bacon, tied or skewered over the breast, and leave them there for at least the first two-thirds of the roasting.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Forty minutes for small birds implies a brisk oven, 425F, or 400F if the fowl are closer to 3 lb. Either way, take them out at 165F in the thickest part of the thigh rather than by the clock.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of allspice is a half teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so a half gill of water in the pan is a quarter cup, there only to stop the drippings scorching. Top it up if it dries out.
- Buying the birds"Small, tender" means young guinea fowl of roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb dressed, sold ready-drawn by game dealers and some butchers. Singeing and drawing are no longer your job; the heads and feet will already be off.
- Larding porkNot lardons pushed through the meat, despite the name, but barding fat laid over the surface. Modern supermarket bacon is cured and often smoked, which will flavour the gravy; unsmoked pancetta or fatback is closer to what is meant.
- Resting and the gravyLet the birds sit ten minutes before carving, which the recipe skips. Skim the pan juices as directed, then deglaze with a splash of water or stock and scrape the fond in, otherwise there is very little liquid to pour over.
- YieldTwo small guinea fowl serve four, or two generously. Halve each bird along the backbone rather than carving in slices; the breasts are small and the legs are the better eating.
Guinea fowl are native to Africa and were kept in the ancient Mediterranean before being reintroduced to Europe by Portuguese traders from the Guinea coast, which is where the English name comes from. By the time this book was compiled they were a familiar barnyard bird in France and in the American South, valued as a semi-wild alternative to chicken with something of the flavour of pheasant. The treatment here, barded with pork, roasted hard and fast, and served on watercress with the skimmed pan juices, is a conventional period treatment for any small lean bird, and much the same method was applied to partridge or young pheasant.