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Goose, Gravy For
Slice a large onion, and fry it in a little butter, or good dripping, with half a pound of gravy-beef, until slightly browned. Pour over it a pint and a half of water, with any bones or trimmings you may have, and simmer gently for two hours. Skim off the fat, season with a little salt and pepper, and mix in the gravy that has dropped from the goose. Thicken with a table-spoonful of flour. Strain the gravy, put a little into the dish with the goose, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Apple sauce also usually accompanies roast goose. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for one pint of gravy.
A brown stock gravy built alongside the roast rather than from it, in the days when a goose was expected to feed a table of eight or more. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the order of operations need attention.
- Gravy-beefVictorian butchers sold "gravy-beef" as lean, gelatinous shin or leg meat, cut for long simmering. Half a pound of beef shin, or shin plus a cracked marrow bone, gives the same result. Chuck works but yields less body.
- A pint and a halfImperial measure: 30 fl oz, or about 3 3/4 US cups. Two hours of gentle simmering reduces this to roughly the pint of finished gravy the recipe promises, so keep the lid ajar rather than sealed.
- Strain before you thickenThe original thickens and then strains, which drags lumps and solids through the sieve together. Strain the stock first, then whisk the flour in as a slurry or as beurre manié (equal flour and butter kneaded cold) and simmer three or four minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Skimming the goose fatGoose drippings are mostly fat, and adding them unskimmed will break the gravy into a greasy film. Let the roasting juices settle in a jug or fat separator, add only the dark liquid beneath, and keep the pure fat for roast potatoes.
- Season lastTwo hours of reduction concentrates any salt you add early. Salt after the liquid is at its final volume and the goose juices are in, since those juices are already seasoned from the bird.
- Yield and serviceOne imperial pint, about 2 1/2 US cups; the recipe states the volume only and gives no number of servings. A little is spooned around the goose in the serving dish and the rest goes to the table separately, which is still the better way to do it.
- Timing with the roastStart the stock when the goose goes in the oven. It can sit off the heat while the bird rests, then be finished with the drippings and thickened in the five minutes before carving.
Roast goose was the standard festive bird in Britain well before turkey displaced it, and the problem it always posed was fat: a goose renders enormous quantities of it and gives up comparatively little in the way of usable pan juices. Hence a gravy like this one, made separately from beef and bones and only finished with what drips from the bird, a practice often said to be common in nineteenth-century English cookery. The costing in pence is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every recipe for the benefit of the household manager working to a weekly budget, and tenpence for a pint of gravy was itself an item to be reckoned with. The apple sauce mentioned at the end is the older partner to goose and pork alike, its sharpness set against rich meat, and the pairing was already so fixed by this date that the book needed only to note it in passing.