Season a fat goose with salt and pepper, and rub well with vinegar. Then core small apples and fill the goose with the whole apples. Put in the baking-pan, sprinkle with flour; pour over 1 cup of hot water; add a lump of butter and bake until done. Baste often with the sauce in the pan. Serve the goose with the whole apples.
A terse Edwardian roasting note that assumes you know how a goose behaves. The apples do the work of stuffing, and the fat does the work of basting — once you understand those two things the rest follows.
- The hinge: render the fatA goose carries a thick subcutaneous fat layer that must be given somewhere to go. Prick the skin all over the breast and thighs with a skewer, angled so you pierce fat but not meat, and pour off the rendered fat from the pan two or three times during roasting. Without this the skin stays flabby and the pan sauce is unusable.
- "Bake until done"Start at 425F for 30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325F for roughly 20 minutes per pound. A 10 lb goose runs about 3 to 3 1/2 hours total. Done means 170-175F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone — goose legs are dark, well-worked muscle and are unpleasant at chicken-breast temperatures.
- Choose the applesThey go in whole and cored, so they want to hold their shape for hours: Rome, Granny Smith or another firm apple that stays intact. Softer cooking apples such as Bramley break down to puree. Small ones, as specified — perhaps five or six for an average bird.
- The apples are aromatics, not a side dishCavity apples cook in a moist, fat-heavy environment, may lag well behind the meat, and absorb a great deal of goose fat. The recipe says to 'serve the goose with the whole apples'; some cooks today discard them and roast a separate tray of apple halves alongside for eating.
- "A lump of butter"Read it as 2 to 3 tablespoons. It is there to help the flour brown at the start; after the first half hour the bird supplies more fat than you can use.
- The vinegar rubCider or white wine vinegar; the recipe salts and peppers first, then rubs the vinegar over. It is said to cut surface fat and help the skin crisp. Salting the day before and leaving the bird uncovered in the refrigerator probably does more for the skin than the vinegar does.
- Basting and the pan sauceThe cup of hot water plus the flour makes a thin gravy base, but it will scorch as it reduces under a fatty bird. Top up with a splash of water or stock whenever the pan looks dry, and skim the fat off at the end before serving.
- Yield and restA goose gives far less meat per pound than a turkey: a 10 lb bird serves six to eight. Rest it 20 to 30 minutes before carving. Save the poured-off fat — refrigerated, it keeps for months and is the best medium there is for roasting potatoes.
Goose, not turkey, was the standard English roast for Christmas and Michaelmas well into the nineteenth century, and apple in the cavity is a long-standing English answer to a fatty bird — the fruit's acid and steam cut the richness from inside, the same logic that puts apple sauce beside roast pork. Older cookery books more often call for onion and sage stuffing; the plain whole-apple version here needs nothing chopped and is quick to assemble. That this book files it simply as "English" among its round-the-world calendar of dishes says something about how firmly roast goose was identified with England by 1900, even as the American Christmas table had already shifted to turkey. Goose clubs — weekly subscription schemes run by pubs and shops so working families could afford a bird by December — were a familiar Victorian institution, and are generally cited as evidence of how much the roast goose mattered.