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Roasting the Bird
After trussing, place the goose on a rack in a dripping pan, sprinkle with salt, cover the breast with thin slices of fat salt pork, and place in the oven. Cook three-quarters of an hour, basting often with the fat in the pan. Then remove pan from oven and drain off all the fat. Remove the slices of pork and sprinkle again with salt and dredge with flour and return to oven. When the flour is delicately browned, add one cup of boiling water and baste often; add more water when necessary. Sprinkle lightly with salt and again dredge with flour. Cook until tender, from one and one-half to three hours, according to the age of the bird. If you have a very young goose it is infinitely better to steam or braise it until tender, then dredge it with salt and flour and brown it richly in the oven. Serve on a bed of cress, garnish with Baked Snow or Jonathan apples.
The book assumes a stuffed, trussed goose already on the table of a cook who has done this before, and it never names an oven temperature. Everything else in it still works.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given because the range was judged by hand. Roast at 325-350F throughout; goose has enough fat that anything hotter will scorch the skin long before the legs are done.
- The fat is the whole pointDraining the pan after the first three-quarters of an hour is the hinge of the recipe. A goose renders a great deal of fat, commonly two to four cups, and if it stays in the pan the flour dredge will fry rather than brown and the drippings will be unusable. Pour it off into a jar and keep it -- it is excellent potato fat.
- Prick the skinThe original relies on barding and long cooking. Score or prick the fat pads over the breast and thighs before it goes in, which lets the subcutaneous fat run out instead of steaming under the skin.
- Doneness, not the clock"One and one-half to three hours, according to the age of the bird" reflects a market that sold birds of widely differing ages; farmed geese today are young and uniform. Work to 170-175F in the thickest part of the thigh. For a 10-12 lb bird that will fall within the range the recipe itself gives -- roughly 2 1/2 to 3 hours in all, including the first 45 minutes.
- Salt porkThin slices of fat salt pork laid over the breast are barding -- insurance for lean breast meat over a long roast. Sliced pork fatback or unsmoked streaky bacon does the same job. Rinse salt pork first if it is heavily cured, since the bird is salted twice more.
- Dredge with flourDredging means dusting the wet skin with a fine layer of flour from a shaker or sieve, not coating it. It browns into a thin crust and, with the cup of boiling water added after, thickens the pan juices into gravy as you baste.
- Steaming a young birdThe alternative given is sound and worth taking: braise or steam covered until tender, likely an hour or more, then dry the skin thoroughly, dredge, and brown at 425F for 20-30 minutes. A wet skin will not crisp.
- GarnishSnow (Fameuse) apples are hard to find; Jonathan still turns up in autumn. Any firm tart baking apple -- Braeburn, Northern Spy -- holds its shape the same way. Cress means garden or watercress, laid raw under the bird.
- YieldA goose gives far less meat per pound than a turkey. Figure a 10-12 lb bird for 6 to 8 people, and rest it 20-30 minutes before carving.
Roast goose belonged to midwinter long before turkey displaced it, and a January goose is a late glimpse of that older calendar -- geese were fattened through autumn, killed after the first hard frosts, and eaten through the dark months. The apple garnish is not decoration but digestive logic: the usual pairing for any very fat bird or joint seems to have been something sharp, whether apple sauce, baked apples, or the currant and cranberry preserves that show up beside pork and duck in the same books. Snow apple, named for its white flesh, is the American name for the Canadian variety Fameuse, and Jonathan was one of the most widely grown market apples in the United States when this book was written; that a cook could be told to choose between two named cultivars says something about how much more specific the apple trade was then than now. The instruction to pour off the fat halfway through was probably as much thrift as technique -- goose grease was kept for frying, for pastry, and, in many households, for rubbing on chests in the same season the goose was eaten.