Take the breast of the goose and cut the meat from the bone; chop fine with some onion, 1 clove of garlic, parsley and a little thyme, salt, black pepper and paprica. Mix with 2 eggs and fine bread-crumbs. Put the chopped breast mixture back on the bone. Place in a baking-dish; pour over some dripping; sprinkle with flour and bake until brown. Serve with sour apple compote.
A forcemeat dish disguised as a roast: the breast is boned, chopped, seasoned and packed back onto its own ribcage before baking. The original gives no quantities beyond the eggs and no oven temperature, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- The hinge: bind it dry enough to holdTwo eggs plus breadcrumbs must be stiff enough to stay on the bone through baking. Add crumbs a handful at a time until the mixture holds a shape when pressed; a loose mix will slump off the carcass and stew in the fat rather than brown.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Start at 400F to set and colour the surface, then drop to 350F to cook through. The forcemeat contains raw egg and poultry, so take it to 165F at the centre.
- DrippingMost likely rendered goose or duck fat here, though in period usage 'dripping' meant whatever rendered roasting fat was to hand. A goose breast will surrender plenty if you render the skin separately. Lard or clarified butter substitutes without changing the character much; olive oil does not.
- Sweat the aromatics firstRaw onion and garlic chopped into a forcemeat can stay crunchy and sharp in the bake. Soften them in a little of the dripping and cool before mixing.
- PapricaThe period spelling for paprika, and in a Viennese recipe it means the sweet Hungarian kind, not smoked Spanish. A tablespoon is not excessive for one large breast.
- The flour dustingSprinkling flour over the fat-basted surface is a browning trick: it absorbs the dripping and crisps into a shell. Use it sparingly or you get a pasty crust.
- Sour apple compoteBramleys or any tart cooking apple, stewed with a little water and only enough sugar to take the edge off. It should stay sharp; sweetened applesauce defeats the point of pairing it with fatty goose.
- YieldOne goose breast, boned and stuffed back, feeds three to four as a main course with the compote and potatoes or dumplings.
Vienna's cooking under the Dual Monarchy was an imperial hybrid, and this dish shows the seams: garlic, paprika and thyme are the Hungarian half speaking, while the sour apple compote beside roast goose is thoroughly Austrian and German. Goose was the standard festive bird across Central Europe long before turkey arrived, and a compiler assembling a dish for each day of the year gave this one December 25. The technique — boning meat out, chopping it with seasonings and a binder, then reassembling it on its own frame — belongs to a large family of European farce dishes that made a small bird look like a larger one and stretched expensive meat with eggs and bread. It also solved a real problem: goose breast roasted plain on the bone dries out, while chopped and bound it stays moist under a crust of flour and fat.