Home › The Principles of Cookery › GOOSE PIE (another way)
GOOSE PIE (another way)
The real English Christmas goose pie proper is made by boning a goose, turkey, fowl, and pigeon, and putting the turkey inside the goose, the fowl inside the turkey, and the pigeon inside the fowl. A strong raised crust is then fixed properly in form, and all are put inside it, any vacancies being filled up with pieces of ham, tongue, or forcemeat. Clarified butter is poured over the whole, the top put on, and the curst brushed over with beaten egg, and ornamented. It should be well bound with three or four folds of buttered paper before being put into the oven. Time to bake, four hours.
A late-Victorian version of the Yorkshire Christmas pie — four birds boned and nested inside a raised crust. It is a project rather than a weeknight dish, and almost everything that can go wrong goes wrong at the boning stage or in judging when the centre is cooked.
- The hinge: keep everything coldBoning four birds takes time, and poultry sitting at room temperature through it is the real risk in this pie. Bone each bird, return it to the refrigerator, and assemble the nest quickly so the whole thing goes into the oven cold at the centre.
- Judge it by temperature, not by four hoursA stuffed raised pie of this size is a dense mass of meat and the four hours given is a rough figure for whatever size birds the writer had in mind. Push a probe through the crust into the innermost bird and look for 165F/74C; that will usually take longer than four hours for a full-size goose.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Modern hot-water-crust practice is to start hot enough to set the crust, around 425F/220C for the first 20 minutes, then drop to 325-350F/165-175C for the remainder; the book itself specifies nothing beyond the four hours.
- Buttered paper means foilButtered paper -- The three or four folds of buttered paper both hold the raised crust together and keep it from burning over a very long bake. Foil will shield the top; if you use it, still tie or band the sides for support, and take the covering off for the last half hour if you want colour.
- Raised crust is hot-water paste"A strong raised crust" means hot-water crust — flour, boiling water and lard — moulded while warm around a form or a floured tin. It is a structural pastry, not a short one, and it wants to be thicker than you think for a pie carrying this weight.
- The birdsSizes must nest: goose, then a small turkey, then a chicken, then a pigeon or squab. Quail will stand in for pigeon. If the birds are not graduated in size the assembly will not close and the crust will split.
- Clarified butterPoured hot, it fills the air pockets and sets to an airtight seal as the pie cools, which is how these pies travelled. Modern practice is to treat the pie as ordinary cooked poultry regardless: cool it quickly, refrigerate, and eat within three or four days.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe gives no yield or serving temperature; a pie of four birds plus ham, tongue and forcemeat will feed a large table, and pies of this type were traditionally eaten cold, cut in wedges from the standing crust. Chill it thoroughly before cutting or the layers collapse.
Multi-bird pies of this kind are generally traced in English cookery to the Yorkshire Christmas pie, which Hannah Glasse described in the eighteenth century as a heavy, thick-crusted thing built to survive the coach journey south to London as a gift. The technique of nesting boned birds one inside another — engastration — is much older and appears across European court cookery, but the English version turned it into a keeping dish: the crust and the poured butter were preservation, not decoration, and the pie was expected to be eaten cold over the days of Christmas rather than carved hot at table. Cassell's calls this "the real English Christmas goose pie proper," a phrase that tells you the simpler one-bird goose pie was by then the ordinary version and this the ambitious survival, the sort of set piece a large late-Victorian household with a competent cook could still attempt.