Clean and season a goose and stuff with oysters well seasoned with salt, pepper, parsley, thyme and bits of butter rolled in fine bread-crumbs. Put in a baking-dish. Pour over the oyster liquor and a little hot water; let bake until done. Baste as often as necessary. Serve with red currant jelly.
October 19 — No. 19
Dutch
A short 1900s formula that assumes you know how to roast a goose. The two things it leaves out are the temperature and the fat, and both decide whether this works.
- The hinge: render the fat firstA goose carries far more subcutaneous fat than a turkey. Prick the skin all over the breast and thighs before it goes in, and pour off the rendered fat from the dish two or three times during roasting. Otherwise the oyster stuffing sits in a bath of grease and the basting the recipe calls for only makes it worse.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none; it says only 'let bake until done.' A workable modern reading is to start at 425F for 30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Size and timeA supermarket goose runs 8-12 lb and feeds six to eight, since the frame is large relative to the meat. Figure roughly 20-22 minutes per pound at 325F after the initial blast, and go by thermometer rather than clock: 170F in the thickest part of the thigh, and 165F in the centre of the stuffing.
- "Clean and season"In 1900 this meant drawing the bird, singeing off pinfeathers and wiping it out. A frozen goose today arrives drawn; pull the loose fat from the cavity (render it separately, it is worth having) and check for quill stubs. Season means salt and pepper inside and out.
- Oysters in stuffingShucked oysters cook in about two minutes, so they will be well past that inside a bird roasting for three hours. Use large oysters, drain them, and bind the stuffing loosely with the crumbs, butter and herbs rather than packing it — a tight stuffing takes so long to reach 165F that the breast dries out. Many cooks now bake the oyster dressing in a separate dish for exactly this reason.
- Oyster liquorStrain it. Shell grit settles in the liquor, and here it goes straight into the pan juices that become your sauce. The recipe asks for the liquor plus 'a little hot water' -- enough between them to film the bottom of the dish, no more.
- Currant jellyNot a garnish but the acid component, in the same role as applesauce with pork. Red currant jelly is still sold; tart cranberry or a sharp damson preserve stands in if you cannot find it.
Goose was a common festive roast in England and in northern Germany and the Low Countries before turkey became the usual bird, and the pairing of a fat bird with oysters was unremarkable rather than luxurious in the nineteenth century -- oysters were cheap and plentiful, shipped inland by rail in barrels, and cookbooks of the period fold them into stuffings and sauces. This entry belongs to the 'a dish a day' genre of collections popular around 1900, in which each recipe was tagged with a nationality; the labels were loose, and a stuffed and basted goose served with red currant jelly would have looked equally at home under a German, English or Dutch heading. What marks it as of its period is the brevity: the writer names no oven temperature, no weight and no roasting time, at a date when a cook was expected to judge heat and doneness by eye.