Remove the skin from the neck of a fat goose and stuff with some soaked bread, fried with 1 small chopped onion in a tablespoonful of goose-dripping. Add chopped parsley, salt, paprica and ginger and mix with 1 egg. Lay in a baking-pan with a little hot water and bake until brown. Serve hot with red cabbage cooked with wine.
A short, forgiving recipe that assumes a whole goose has just been broken down in your own kitchen. The main obstacles today are sourcing the neck skin and the total absence of an oven temperature.
- The hinge: close both endsThe original never says so, but the neck skin is a tube and the stuffing swells as it bakes. Sew or tie one end shut, fill loosely — no more than three-quarters — and close the other, or the filling escapes into the pan and the skin shrivels.
- Getting the skinWhole geese are often sold with the neck still on, though it is just as often removed and bagged with the giblets; a butcher will usually save one if asked. A goose neck yields a tube of roughly 8-10 inches. Duck neck skin works the same way at about half the size, and turkey neck skin is a rough substitute.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F, which browns the skin steadily without splitting it. The little hot water in the pan keeps the underside from scorching before the inside is set; top it up if it dries out.
- Doneness"Bake until brown" is not enough for a stuffing bound with raw egg inside a fatty casing. Allow about an hour and take the centre of the filling to 165F.
- PapricaPeriod spelling of paprika. Hungarian sweet paprika is what is meant here — a generous teaspoon or more. Smoked Spanish paprika is a different flavour and out of place.
- Goose drippingThe fat saved from roasting a goose; rendered goose or duck fat sold in jars is the nearest equivalent, if slightly less savoury for lacking the roasting juices. Lacking either, use butter, though the result is plainer.
- Soaked breadStale white bread soaked in water or milk and squeezed nearly dry — roughly 3 to 4 ounces of bread for one goose neck. It should be a moist crumb, not a paste.
- YieldOne goose neck feeds two as a main course, or four to six sliced thinly as a first course. It slices most cleanly after resting ten minutes.
- The red cabbageShredded red cabbage braised with red wine, a little vinegar, sugar and an apple, for around 45 minutes. The acid is what keeps it red; without it the cabbage turns blue-grey.
Stuffed goose neck belongs to the frugal end of European goose cookery, where nothing from a bird that expensive was discarded: the fat rendered, the liver eaten separately, the giblets to soup, and the neck skin filled and roasted as a small extra dish. Versions run across Hungary, Austria, Poland and the Jewish kitchens of Central and Eastern Europe, where it is known as helzel or gefilte helzel and is filled with flour or matzo meal rather than bread. The paprika and ginger here mark it as the Hungarian version for an American readership; paprika is often said to have become the shorthand for Hungarian cooking in English-language cookbooks by this period, and a book organised as a dish a day from a different nation leaned on exactly that kind of signal. Red cabbage cooked with wine is a common partner for goose in the region, and the pairing is generally said to have more to do with cutting the fat than with any national rule.