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Roast Goose, with Chestnut Dressing
Prepare the goose as above and stuff with a dressing made as follows: Take some stale bread cut in dice, salt, pepper, sage and a spoonful of butter. Add to this twelve chestnuts, boiled and chopped. Stuff the goose and bake nice and brown, basting frequently. Very nice.-Mrs. Granlees.
A contributor's note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you have already read the goose recipe printed above it, and it assumes a cook who knows what a goose does in the oven. The gaps are worth filling in.
- "Prepare the goose as above"The preceding entry presumably covers the cleaning and dressing of the bird. A modern bird comes ready for the oven; rinse, dry it thoroughly, and pull the loose pads of fat from inside the cavity before stuffing.
- Scale the dressing upTwelve chestnuts and "some" bread will not fill an 8-10 lb goose. Reckon on 6 to 8 cups of stale bread dice, a pound of chestnuts in the shell (upwards of two cups peeled and chopped), 2 to 3 tablespoons butter, and a tablespoon of dried sage or twice that fresh. Salt firmly.
- ChestnutsScore each shell with an X, boil 15-20 minutes, and peel while hot -- both the shell and the papery inner skin come away only while the nut is warm. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; "bake nice and brown" is the whole of its guidance. Modern practice for goose is roughly 425F for the first 30 minutes, then 325F for about 20 minutes per pound, with a stuffed bird at the long end of that.
- Basting is the wrong instructionGoose renders enormous quantities of its own fat and does not need spooning. Prick the skin all over the breast and thighs, set the bird on a rack, and pour or ladle fat out of the pan two or three times during roasting so it does not smoke. Keep the fat; it is the best roasting medium in the kitchen.
- DonenessThe thigh should read 170F and the stuffing at the centre of the cavity 165F. Because a fatty bird insulates its stuffing, the dressing is often the last thing to come up to temperature -- check it, not just the meat.
- YieldAn 8-10 lb goose feeds perhaps four to six. There is far less meat on a goose than its size suggests, and the carcass makes excellent stock.
Goose was the festive bird of the English and northern European table long before turkey displaced it, and it carried that role into American kitchens through the nineteenth century -- roasted for Michaelmas in the older tradition, for Christmas in the later one. Chestnuts belong with it for practical reasons as much as ceremonial: both were autumn foods, and the sweet, starchy nut absorbs the fat that pours out of the bird. The blight that destroyed the American chestnut was not identified until 1904, though much of the chestnut sold commercially in nineteenth-century American cities was imported European stock in any case, and most chestnuts sold in the United States today are European or Asian. The brevity of the entry and the signature "Mrs. Granlees" mark it as a contributed recipe of the kind that filled community and subscription cookbooks -- written by one experienced cook for another, with everything obvious left out.