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Forcemeat for Goose
Chop very finely two ounces of onions, pour boiling water on them and cover the basin with a plate. When they have steamed a few minutes, pour off the water, and add the same weight of bread-crumbs and the parboiled liver, or a little beef minced small, with half a dozen sage-leaves, or more if liked. Flavour with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Some cooks boil the onions, but as this mode takes from the freshness of the forcemeat, the above preparation of onions will be found to please most lovers of goose. Butter may be used, bits of it being mixed with the forcemeat, but a well conditioned goose will not require butter.
A sage and onion stuffing in miniature — the quantities given are enough for a small bird or a demonstration, and most cooks will want to scale them up. The distinctive step is the scalding of the raw onion rather than boiling it.
- Scald, don't boilThe point of pouring boiling water over the chopped onion and covering the basin is to take off the raw bite while keeping the onion's sharpness. The recipe allows only "a few minutes" of steaming; drain thoroughly or the crumbs turn to paste.
- Scale the quantitiesTwo ounces of onion and two ounces of crumbs is roughly half a small onion and a cup of fresh crumbs — enough for a duck at best. For a 10-12 lb goose, multiply by four to six, keeping the onion and crumbs at equal weight.
- Bread-crumbsThese mean fresh crumbs from a stale-ish white loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold for coating. Dried crumbs will drink the goose fat and set hard.
- SageHalf a dozen fresh sage leaves, shredded fine. If using dried rubbed sage, about half a teaspoon per six fresh leaves; it is much stronger and easily overwhelms the onion.
- The liverThe goose liver, simmered a few minutes until just firm, then chopped fine. Modern birds often arrive without giblets — the beef alternative the recipe offers works, or use a couple of chicken livers.
- Cooking itIf packed inside the bird, the stuffing must reach 165F/74C at the centre, which on a large goose can mean overcooking the breast. Baking it separately in a dish with a few spoonfuls of goose fat, 350F for 30-40 minutes, is the more reliable route.
- ButterThe advice to skip it holds. A goose renders a great deal of fat during roasting and stuffing inside the cavity will be well lubricated; only a separately baked dish of it needs added fat.
Sage and onion is the classic English stuffing for goose, well established in English cookery books by the eighteenth century, and sage was traditionally credited with helping the stomach cope with rich, fatty meat — a belief that outlasted its medical justification and became simple habit. The recipe reads as a technique rather than a fixed formula: it gives the ratio (equal weights of onion and crumb), the flavouring, and the liver, and lets the cook add more sage if liked. The small aside about scalding rather than boiling the onion is the sort of opinionated detail that distinguishes a working Victorian kitchen manual from a list of ingredients; goose was a festival bird, eaten at Michaelmas and Christmas, and cooks had strong views about it.