Clean and cut a fat goose into pieces; season with salt, pepper and ginger. Put in a stew-pan with 1 sliced onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 bay-leaf, thyme and a few peppercorns; add the juice of a lemon. Cover with hot water and let cook until tender. Thicken with flour and serve hot with apple-sauce.
A plain braise that depends almost entirely on how you handle the goose fat. The recipe assumes a bird bought whole and jointed at home, and a cook who will render and save every spoonful of that fat.
- Render before you braiseA fat goose cut into pieces will throw an enormous amount of fat, easily two cups. Brown the pieces skin-side down in the dry pan over moderate heat first, pour the fat off into a jar, and only then add the aromatics and water. Skipping this leaves the finished dish greasy and the flour thickening will not save it.
- Bird size and yieldA goose runs 8-12 lb and serves 6-8 once jointed. Legs and thighs want the full braise; the breast dries out over a long stew and is better removed once cooked and returned to the simmering pot at the end to heat through.
- "Cover with hot water"Use enough to come three-quarters up the pieces rather than submerging them, or the sauce will be thin and washed out. Stock is better than water if you have it, made from the neck, wing tips and gizzard.
- Timing"Until tender" is roughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer for legs. The joint should give when twisted. A hard boil tightens goose meat and clouds the liquid.
- GingerAlmost certainly ground dried ginger rather than fresh root, given it is listed with the salt and pepper. Half a teaspoon for a whole bird; it is a seasoning note, not a flavour you should be able to name.
- ThickeningRather than stirring raw flour into the pot, skim the fat and whisk a tablespoon or two of it with equal flour into a roux, then add the cooking liquid. Raw flour stirred in at the end tastes pasty unless it is given time to cook out.
- Kashrut, since the recipe is titled JewishThe dish contains no dairy, which is the point: goose fat and the flour thickening replace butter, so the braise can be served at a meat meal. A commercially koshered goose is already salted, so taste before adding more.
- Apple-sauceUnsweetened or barely sweetened works best against the fat. Make it while the goose braises; a pound of tart apples cooked down with a splash of water is enough for the table.
Goose was the practical fat bird of Central and Eastern European Jewish kitchens, where pork lard was out of the question and butter could not be served with meat: the bird was valued above all for its schmaltz, which was rendered and stored to cook with for months afterward. Stewing the jointed pieces with onion, garlic, bay and lemon juice is a thrifty way to make the tougher cuts palatable once the fat has been taken off. The label "Jewish" here functions the way "Polish" or "Toulonaise" does on the surrounding pages -- a shorthand for a cuisine the compiler expected readers to recognise but not to know well. Apple sauce is a standard accompaniment to roast goose across German-speaking Europe.