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Goose, Marinaded
Pluck, singe, and bone a goose. If the latter operation is too difficult, it may be dispensed with. Stuff the bird with a highly-seasoned sage-and-onion stuffing, truss it securely, and fry it in a little hot fat until slightly browned all round. Take it up, put it in a saucepan, just cover it with good gravy, and let it simmer gently for two hours and a half. Drain it, put it in the oven to keep warm; skim the gravy, thicken it with a little flour and butter, add some browning, a table-spoonful of lemon pickle, an anchovy, pounded, and a seasoning of pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. A glass of port may be added, if liked. Put the goose on a hot dish, pour the gravy over it, and serve. Probable cost of goose, 6s. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A braise rather than a marinade — the name refers to the older sense of steeping meat in a seasoned liquid, which here happens in the pan. The whole success of the dish rests on how thoroughly you skim, since a goose releases an extraordinary amount of fat into the gravy.
- Skim, then skim againA 10 lb goose can give up a pint or more of fat over two and a half hours, and unskimmed it will make the sauce greasy beyond rescue. Lift the bird out, let the liquid settle five minutes, and draw the fat off; chilling the strained liquid and lifting the solid cap is cleaner still.
- Bird size and vesselA Victorian roasting goose typically ran somewhere around 8-12 lb; buy at a similar weight. Very few domestic pans will take a trussed goose with liquid to cover, so use a large oval casserole or roasting pan with foil and a lid, and turn the bird once halfway through.
- BoningThe recipe's own escape clause is sound advice. Boned and rolled, the goose cooks more evenly and carves into neat slices.
- "Good gravy"This means brown stock, not thickened sauce — veal or poultry stock, enough to just cover the bird. Anything watery here shows up directly in the finished sauce.
- Oven to keep warmAround 250–275F, loosely covered, while you finish the gravy. Any hotter and the skin, already softened by braising, will dry and tighten.
- Lemon pickleA standard Georgian and Victorian store cupboard item: sliced lemons salted and steeped with spices — recipes vary, but mace, nutmeg, garlic and horseradish are common — then strained. It is essentially a sharp spiced condiment. A tablespoon of preserved-lemon brine plus a squeeze of juice gives the nearest note.
- Browning and anchovy"Browning" is caramelised sugar colouring — a teaspoon of dark caramel or a little gravy browning. The pounded anchovy is a seasoning, not a flavour in its own right: one salted fillet or a scant teaspoon of anchovy paste, mashed smooth, and salt the sauce only after it has gone in.
- YieldEight to ten as stated, which is realistic for a goose of this size given the high proportion of bone and fat. Boned, it stretches further. Reserve the rendered fat for potatoes.
The seasonings tell you the age of the method: lemon pickle, pounded anchovy, browning and grated nutmeg are the flavour vocabulary of eighteenth-century English cookery, carried forward almost unchanged into Victorian compendia. Anchovy in particular functioned as a general savoury sharpener in gravies for meat and game long before glutamate was understood, and lemon pickle was a bottled kitchen store kept for exactly this purpose. The stated price of 6s. is substantial \—, a goose was a celebratory bird, associated with Michaelmas and with Christmas in households where turkey was not yet standard, and a recipe feeding eight or ten was written for a table with company at it.