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November 2
Menu: Baked Rolled Fillets of Fish, Bechamel; Sauce; Cucumber Salad Yeast Rolls; Roast Guinea Chickens, Guava Jelly; Rice Croquettes Scalloped Egg Plant; Pear and Celery Salad; Lemon Sherbet; Coffee; Sponge Cake; a Roast Guinea Chickens-Put 2 tablespoons Crisco in each of the birds, this prevents them getting dry. Slit 2 slices bacon once or twice then tie over breasts of birds, which should be trussed for roasting. Wrap them in Criscoed paper and bake in quick oven for 30 minutes, baste well and frequently; for the last 8 minutes remove paper and bacon; sprinkle with a little flour, salt and pepper, baste well, and let brown. Serve on hot dish, garnished with rolls of bacon. Hand with it gravy, bread sauce, and guava jelly.
A dated entry from the book's dinner calendar, printed here under a mismatched heading. It is a straightforward roast of young guinea fowl, and the only real variables are bird size and oven heat.
- "Quick oven"Generally taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. The high heat is what makes thirty minutes plausible for small birds under a paper wrap.
- Guinea chickensYoung guinea fowl, roughly 1.5 to 2.5 lb dressed. Anything heavier will need considerably longer than the stated half hour. Cook to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh rather than by the clock.
- Criscoed paperA sheet of parchment or butcher's paper smeared with shortening and wrapped round the bird, the period equivalent of a foil tent. Parchment works the same way; ordinary printer paper does not.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book exists to promote, reformulated since to remove partially hydrogenated oil. Modern shortening behaves the same in the cavity and on the paper; butter or a neutral oil will do as well.
- BastingGuinea fowl is very lean and dries fast, which is the entire reason for the bacon, the cavity fat and the paper. Baste at least three times in the half hour.
- The last eight minutesPaper and bacon come off, the flour-and-seasoning dusting goes on, and the skin browns. Watch it closely at this heat, as the flour catches quickly.
- Bread sauceA British accompaniment to roast game birds: milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with fresh breadcrumbs and finished with butter. Not sold ready-made in most of the U.S.
- YieldOne guinea fowl serves two, occasionally three with substantial sides. The recipe assumes at least two birds.
The Crisco "Calendar of Dinners" material was published by Procter & Gamble in the early 1910s, shortly after Crisco itself went on sale, and its recipe collection functions as an extended demonstration that the new shortening could do anything butter or lard did. The entries are arranged day by day, which is why this one carries the date November 3, deep in game season. Guinea fowl are native to West Africa and reached American farmyards by way of the colonial trade; they were kept as much for their noisy vigilance as for the table, and their dark, lean meat is often treated more like game than like chicken, hence the bacon barding, the bread sauce and the sweet jelly alongside. Guava jelly stands in here for the usual currant.