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Goose Hams
Geese are in some parts salted, cured, and smoked. Cut the goose through the back, the breast, and legs. Rub a quarter of an ounce of saltpetre well into it, and, afterwards, half a pound of salt, and two ounces of good brown sugar. Let the bird remain in pickle for three days, turning it every day, and rubbing it well with the seasoning. Dip the pieces, wet with the brine, into sawdust, covering each piece well. Hang them in smoke for a week, then let them hang in a dry place. Before using them, rub off the sawdust. They are eaten without further cooking, with bread and butter. The lean should be red, and the fat white.
This is a cold-cure and cold-smoke for raw goose that is then eaten without cooking. Every safeguard modern curing depends on — measured nitrite, controlled temperature, a known salt concentration in the finished meat — is either absent or unquantified here, and the failure mode is not an upset stomach.
- The meat is never cookedThe instruction is explicit: "eaten without further cooking." Everything standing between the reader and Salmonella, Listeria and Clostridium botulinum is the cure itself, and this cure is not specified tightly enough to do that job.
- Saltpetre is out of rangeA quarter ounce of potassium nitrate rubbed onto a whole jointed goose is an unmeasured dose against an unmeasured weight of meat. Nitrate must also be converted to nitrite by bacteria before it protects anything, which is why commercial curing now uses weighed nitrite salt at a fixed parts-per-million against the exact weight of the meat. Rubbing crystals onto a surface gives no control at all.
- Three days will not cure a gooseHalf a pound of salt applied to the outside of a split bird for three days penetrates the surface. The interior of the thigh and the tissue against the bone stay effectively fresh, and that is precisely where anaerobic spoilage organisms survive a smoke that never gets hot.
- "Hang them in smoke for a week" is cold smoking"Hang them in smoke for a week" implies cold smoking -- the recipe gives no temperature, but a week-long hang in smoke cannot be a hot smoke; it dries and flavours rather than pasteurises. Cold smoking raw poultry for later raw consumption is done commercially only under controlled water activity, salt levels and testing.
- The sawdust coatingDipping brine-wet meat in sawdust to form a crust assumes clean, known, untreated hardwood dust. Modern sawdust may be from treated, glued or resinous timber; treated wood and manufactured board are not food-safe, and resinous softwood dust is best avoided.
- Reading the colour is not a test"The lean should be red, and the fat white" is the period's quality check. Cured colour tells you nitrate has reacted with the muscle pigment near the surface; it says nothing about whether pathogens survive deeper in, and dangerous cured meat can look perfectly correct.
- If you want smoked gooseUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure weights as a percentage of meat weight, specifies nitrite rather than saltpetre, and either hot-smokes to a measured internal temperature or sets out tested cold-smoke parameters.
Salted and smoked goose is old across northern Europe, particularly around the Baltic and in Pomerania, where the fattened autumn bird was jointed and preserved to carry a household through winter; smoked goose breast survives as a delicacy in Germany and Austria, and cured goose was long a feature of Jewish kitchens in central and eastern Europe, where goose fat and goose meat did the work that pork did elsewhere. The name "ham" here simply means a cured leg or joint eaten cold in slices, not anything to do with pig. Cassell's opens the entry with "in some parts," locating the practice regionally rather than presenting it as universal.