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To Roast A Goose
Singe, remove the pin feathers, and before it is cut or drawn, wash and scrub thoroughly in soap suds, to open and cleanse the pores and render the oil more easy to be extracted. Then draw, wash and rinse the inside in clear water, and wipe dry. Stuff with mashed potatoes, highly seasoned with onions, sage, salt and pepper, or with equal parts of bread crumbs, chopped apples and boiled onions; season with salt, sage and pepper. Sew and truss; put on a rack in a pan and cover the breast with slices of fat, salt pork.
Place it in the oven for three quarters of an hour. The pork fat is quickly drawn out by the heat, flows over the goose and aids in drawing out the oil. When considerable oil is extracted, take the pan from the oven and pour off all the oil. Remove the pork and dredge the goose with flour, and place again in oven. When the flour is browned, add a little hot water and baste often. Dredge with flour after basting. Cook until brown and tender. Make a gravy. Garnish with water cresses and serve with apple sauce.
A sound method for a fatty bird, though the opening instruction belongs to another era of kitchen hygiene. The essential idea — render the fat off early, then brown the skin — is still the best way to roast a goose.
- Skip the soap sudsWashing a bird in soapy water was standard advice when poultry came from the yard rather than a plant, but it does nothing to "open the pores" and it spreads bacteria around the sink. Wipe the goose dry inside and out and leave it at that; if the skin needs help, prick it all over with a skewer or score it in a diamond pattern, which genuinely does let fat escape.
- The hinge: pour off the fatEverything else follows from this. Goose gives up an enormous amount of fat — easily two to three cups — and if it sits in the pan the skin steams instead of crisping and the drippings scorch. Draw the pan out every 30 to 40 minutes and ladle the fat into a heatproof jar. Keep it; goose fat is the best roasting fat there is for potatoes.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature. Start at 425F for the first 30 to 45 minutes to get the fat running, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder. The final dredging-and-browning stage can go back up to 425F for the last 15 minutes.
- Total time and donenessThree quarters of an hour is only the first stage. A 10 to 12 lb goose needs roughly 2.5 to 3 hours in all. Go by temperature rather than the clock: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Goose legs are tough until well done, so err toward 170-175F in the leg while keeping the breast from drying.
- "Dredge with flour"Sifting flour over the wet skin and letting it brown was the period way of building both colour and the base of the gravy. It works, but the skin must be reasonably dry and the fat poured off first, or the flour turns to paste. A light dusting is enough.
- The salt pork blanketBarding was needed for lean birds; a goose does not lack fat. The book's stated reason is that the melting pork fat flows over the bird and helps draw out its oil; in practice the pork mainly shields the breast while the interior comes up to heat. Fatty bacon or a butter-soaked cloth does the same job, or you can simply tent the breast with foil and remove it for the final browning.
- Stuffing, and a caution about itBoth fillings given are traditional and good; the potato-sage version is the more substantial, and the bread, apple and onion mixture belongs to the familiar sage-and-onion family of goose stuffings. Stuffing inside a large bird rarely reaches a safe temperature before the meat overcooks; bake it in a separate dish, moistened with a little stock and some of the poured-off goose fat.
- Yield and gravyA goose looks larger than it eats. Reckon on a 10 lb bird serving six to eight, since the frame is heavy and the meat sits mostly on the breast and legs. For the gravy, deglaze the pan after the fat is off, using the browned flour already there plus stock made from the neck and giblets.
Goose was the ordinary festive bird of the English-speaking table long before turkey displaced it — Michaelmas in September and Christmas in December were both goose occasions, and the animal had the advantage of fattening on stubble and kitchen scraps rather than costly feed. That is why the book treats it as a familiar joint and spends its instructions on the one real problem: the fat. Much of the period's advice about goose is advice about extracting oil, and the pairing with apple sauce, sage and onion follows the same logic, sharp and aromatic against a rich meat. The soap-and-water scrub reflects a widespread nineteenth-century belief that the skin's "pores" could be opened by washing, an idea carried over from human hygiene into the kitchen and long since abandoned. Goose fat itself was never wasted: it was saved for pastry, for frying, for dressing potatoes, and, by folk custom, rubbed on chests as a winter remedy.