5.5 Poultry – Completed!

Well another milestone has been reached: with the cooking up of a vegetarian tri-gourd garnish I have completed the Poultry section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter of English Food by Jane Grigson. In just 18 recipes, Jane manages to cram in a surprising variety and runs the full gamut of poultry: chicken and capon, turkey, goose, duck and guineafowl are all represented(quail is covered in Game). On top of that she includes lesser used parts of birds too: neck, liver and giblets all get a mention, as do boiling fowls.

It might not surprise you that the majority of the recipes are chicken-based. I am working from her 1992 third edition a time when chicken is ubiquitous, but when she wrote the first edition in 1974, the battery ‘farms’ was in its infancy. Prior to the 1970s, chicken was an expensive meat, saved for special occasions, but with the great ‘success’ of the factory bird, it took over the world. Today there are 23 billion chickens on the planet. Jane muses: ‘Poultry and game are, for very different reasons, the mavericks of the meat trade, representing its worst – frozen battery chicken – and its best – woodcock and grouse.’ Of chicken in the 1990s she despairs: ‘I didn’t realize quite how far we had lost flavour in poultry’. What would she say now in a Britain threatened by imports of chlorinated chickens and lab-grown chicken meat?

It isn’t news to anyone that the vast majority of chickens are raised in filth and squalor, but it’s not all bad, and there still places where chickens are raised free range – and I mean truly free range, not technically. Such fowls can be found at farmers’ markets across the country. Personally, I worry about the freedom of the bird other whether it is organic. A good example of this is Packington who farm their chickens (and cockerels) the traditional way. They are more expensive, and therefore I eat chicken less. It should be the way of things, after all. They have an excellent flavour that is essential for when a chicken is to be poached, say, for example, when preparing #225 Cockie-Leekie.

Only on the rare occasion I buy a chicken from a supermarket, do I insist upon it being organically farmed; for animals, being certified organic does not just mean it has been fed organic grain etc., but has received a higher standard of husbandry than for a regular farmed animal.

I am in the minority with this view. Chickens – or maybe birds in general – simply do not provoke the same empathy us that mammals do. Some possibly don’t even consider them animals at all. Maybe we would care more if they had more expressive faces, paws not claws, and fur instead of feathers.

The chapter is about more than chickens though, though Jane does make the point that our farmed poultry – especially ducks – don’t resemble the old traditional breeds either:

We know and are told too little. Wool is pulled over our eyes to the point of blindness. Take Aylesbury duck. Sounds nice and historical. It was once the preferred breed for its rich, fine deliciousness. Don’t be fooled. What you have on your plate has barely an Aylesbury gene in its body…

She opines too for the breeds lost because they do not fit with today’s capitalistic farming systems. Perhaps we should all buy goose – they stubbornly resist mass farming methods.

Cooking the recipes in this part of the book introduced me to a whole new world of poultry: I had never ‘boiled’ a whole turkey or eaten a capon, nor had I really cooked with poultry offal or made my own (#276) Giblet Gravy. One of the best discoveries was the delicious combination of mussels and chicken, and the deliciousness of guineafowl was a revelation.

Several recipes are now part of my repertoire, both at home and professionally, and there have been some high scorers and memorable meals. #147 Devilled Chicken Livers was the only one to score full marks, though #100 Roast Turkey with Lemon Stuffing is now a Christmas standard as is #298 Pulled and Devilled Turkey on Boxing Day. The most cooked recipe though is #225 Cockie-Leekie. I make it at home, but also cooked it up regularly when The Buttery was open. It is sublime and containing only chicken, beef, prunes and leeks, it is simplicity itself. The medieval stuffing from #405 Turkey Neck Pudding and #399 Duck Braised with Green Peas have also turned up on past menus. Lastly #442 Smoked Chicken with Three-Melon Salad simply must be attempted by anyone who owns a cold-smoker (skip the salad though).

There were only a couple of duds: #443 Three-Gourd Garnish was two thirds underwhelming and one third unpalatable, the bitter gourd being so bitter, just a tiny piece was completely inedible – I, or Jane, must have got something wrong there. And then there was #339 Hindle Wakes, the bizarre cold, prune-stuffed chicken, painted with a congealed lemon sauce. In my little review of the meal, I described it as a monster, ‘a cross between something from Fanny Cradock’s 1970s repertoire and the centrepiece of a medieval feast.’ Why it would be included, and a traditional roast chicken or goose missed out, I don’t know.

Due to a minority of poor recipes, the 18 recipes of the Poultry section scored a mean of 7.56/10, putting it in second place after Pork (8.06/10). For who like their stats, Poultry had a median and mode of 7.5. Measuring averages this, actually puts Beef & Veal at the top of the meat sections thus far, though Poultry remains in second place.

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As usual, I have listed the recipes below in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts and their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.

#335 Boiled Capon with Sugar Peas 5.5/10

#334 Salmagundi for a Middle Dish at Supper 6.5/10

#235 Lisanne’s Chicken with Mussels 7.5/10

#339 Hindle Wakes 5/10

#225 Cockie-Leekie 7.5/10

#442 Smoked Chicken with Three-Melon Salad 7.5/10

#443 Three-Gourd Garnish 3/10

#147 Devilled Chicken Livers 10/10

#210 Coarse Chicken Liver Pâté 8.5/10

#100 Roast Turkey with Parsley and Lemon Stuffing 9.5/10

#276 Giblet Gravy 9/10

#405 Capon, Goose or Turkey Neck Pudding/Poddyng of Capoun Necke (1430) 7/10

#298 Pulled and Devilled Turkey, Chicken or Pheasant 9.5/10

#314 Boiled Turkey with Celery Sauce 7/10

#399 Duck Stewed with Green Peas 9/10

#178 Duck with Mint 7.5/10

#427 Roast Guineafowl 9/10

#222 Guineafowl Braised with Mushrooms 8/10

#427 Roast Guineafowl

Guineafowl originate in Africa and were first bred for meat by the Ancient Egyptians and was very popular in the ancient world – there is an infamous Greek dish called mattye where a guineahen would be killed by a knife plunged into its head via the beak. It would then be poached with lots of herbs, and its own chicks! They seemed to fall out of favour for a good while before being reintroduced by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.

These days, guineafowl are more popular in France than the UK, being a popular ornamental fowl in farms, small holdings and rural households. They double as an excellent guard dog; getting very vocal at any approaching fox or indeed, postman. ‘The first time I saw guineafowl, they were humped along the roof ridge of a French farmhouse’, says Jane in her introduction to this recipe. I have similar memories from my science days when I would go on the annual field trip with the zoology undergraduates of Manchester University to the foothills of the French Alps, where guineafowl would toddle about decoratively with their black-and-white suits, blue combs bobbing, like a little fat harlequin.

I think guineafowl are delicious, they have a mild gamey flavour, lying somewhere between chicken and pheasant. It’s often braised as it has a tendency to dry out when roasted. In this recipe however, dryness is skilfully averted by covering the fowls with bacon or strips of pork back fat and the use of a good sausagemeat stuffing. Because of its gaminess, it is often served with the trimmings associated with roast game, such as game chips, #123 Bread Sauce and #114 Quince Jelly. See #122 Roast Pheasant for more on the subject.

Get hold of two guineafowl, both weighing 1 ½ to 2 pounds. Sit them on the board to get to room temperature as you get on with the stuffing.

Remove the skin from four ounces of good quality sausages (go to butcher who makes his or her own or make your own: see #415 Cumberland Sausages). Break up the meat and add the rest of the ingredients: a heaped tablespoon of breadcrumbs, one tablespoon each of brandy and port, a heaped tablespoon of chopped parsley, a crushed clove of garlicand salt and pepper. If you are lucky enough to find fowl with their giblets, find the liver, remove the gall, chop and add to the stuffing.

Mix everything well but keep things quite loose – you don’t want to compress the stuffing, as it will turn out stodgy. Divide it loosely between the two birds.

Now prepare the birds themselves by laying six rashers of unsmoked streaky bacon over the breasts and legs. This stops the birds from drying out in the oven. Again, buy good quality dry-cured bacon, not the cheap stuff that shrinks shedding its added water as white milky froth. Instead of bacon, you could use thin slices of pork back fat; it’s certainly cheaper, and it probably keeps the birds more moist, but doesn’t taste half as good. Pros and cons innit?

Put them in a roasting tray and pop them in an oven preheated to 220°C. Fifteen minutes later, turn down the heat to 200°C, and leave the birds roasting for 30 minutes. At this point, remove them from the oven, take off their little porky jackets and dust them with well-seasoned flour. Baste and pop back into the oven for a final 10 to 15 minutes.

Remove the birds and keep them under foil on a board whilst you make the gravy in the tin they were roasted.

Get the roasting tin over a medium heat and pour in a glass of port (2 to 3 fluid ounces, approx.). Use a wooden spoon to scrape the delicious dark-brown almost burned bits from base of the tin. Add ½ pint of stock – again, if there were giblets in the birds, you could make giblet stock, otherwise use chicken stock. Reduce this mixture down until you have a small volume of intensely-flavoured gravy. Don’t strain it and lose all those nice burnt bits!

Carve the guineafowl and serve with the gravy and bacon. Jane recommends serving it with #262 Chestnuts as a Vegetable. We served it with the food that was in the house: roast carrots, quinoa and some lovely indigo-dark purple kale.

#427 Roast Guineafowl. I feel so lucky to have things like this just hanging about in the freezer! The cooking method laid out by Jane was spot-on, as she usually is when it comes to roasting (however, see #359 Rabbit and #393 Hare); meat was lovely and moist. The gravy too was delicious, and the stuffing well-seasoned with a good garlic hit, making it taste very un-English; it must be based on a French farcemeat from one of Jane’s many trips to the country. Very, very good: 9/10

#222 Guinea Fowl Braised with Mushrooms

The poultry section of English Food has not been tackled much; I don’t know why, because I’m a big fan of poultry. Anyways, walked through the Arndale Market in Manchester City Centre, I spotted that the butcher had some Guinea fowl – not something you really see these days out of specialist poulterers, so I thought I should snap one up as I had the opportunity (I also bought some corn-fed chickens so that I can address the lack of poultry recipes tackled later).

Guinea fowl is very popular in France, but are not so in Britain these days, though they were once considered very nutritional and perfect food for invalids, so why for a nation of sickly pasty folk, we don’t eat them by the bucketful I don’t know. In Burkina Faso, braised Guinea fowl are given to women that have just given birth. So there you go; prolong your life with a Guinea fowl dinner.

This recipe serves 3 to 4 people: Start by browning a Guinea fowl all over in butter and then placing it in a reasonably tight-fitting casserole dish breast down and dot it with two further ounces of butter. Now finely chop a medium-sized onion and sprinkle it around the sides of the bird and season. Cover tightly with lid or foil and bake for 30 minutes at 190⁰C. Meanwhile, slice 12 ounces of mushrooms and season them with salt, pepper and lemon juice (why Griggers says to do this now, I do not know), and when the 30 minutes is up, turn the fowl breast-side up and tuck the mushrooms in down the sides. Replace the lid and bake for another 40 minutes, taking the lid off for the final ten, so that the Guinea fowl can brown. Allow everything to rest for 20 minutes, then remove the bird and cut into eight pieces: two thighs, two drumsticks and four pieces of breast. Dish them up with the mushrooms and pour over the remaining buttery gravy. Serve with potatoes or bread.

My lens steamed up, sorry!

#222 Guinea Fowl Braised with Mushrooms. This was the first time I’d eaten it, and it did not disappoint. The flesh tasted like a very rich chicken and was a little gamey; so something between a chicken and pheasant (in fact, Griggers says that all Guinea fowl and pheasant recipes are interchangeable). Briasing it in butter made the meat extremely moist and succulent, the slightly earthy mushrooms offsetting it all very well. Great stuff – and easy 8/10.