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Goose Pie
This is made either with one goose, or, what is better still, two green geese. Braise or stew them (see GOOSE A L ARLESIENNE), and cut each goose into eight pieces; season, and put them into a good raised crust. Or they may be put into a pie-dish with a short crust, in the usual way. A good-sized piece of butter should be put into the dish. Time, two hours to bake. Probable cost, one goose, 6s. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A late-Victorian pie that assumes you already know two things the text does not spell out: that the birds are cooked before they ever meet the pastry, and that a "raised crust" is hot-water paste built by hand, not a lined dish. Everything else follows from those.
- Braise first, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe is that the geese are fully braised or stewed before jointing. The two hours in the oven set and colour the crust and marry the seasoning; they will not tenderise raw goose, which needs long, slow, moist cooking to become edible.
- Green geeseA green goose is a young bird, killed before it has been fattened on stubble; usage varied, but under four months is the usual reckoning. Dressed weight would have been modest, perhaps 5-6 lb, against a modern goose of roughly 9-12 lb, so one modern bird stands in for the two green geese called for here.
- Raised crustThis means hot-water crust: flour, salt, and lard or butter melted into boiling water, worked while warm and moulded around a jar or wooden block into free-standing walls. It is a structural pastry, not a tender one, and the paste has to be handled while still warm, since it stiffens as it cools.
- Or the easier routeThe alternative given, a pie-dish with short crust "in the usual way", means a deep dish with a pastry lid only. That is the sensible version for a first attempt and bakes far more evenly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a coal range. As a modern suggestion only: for a raised pie, 400F for the first 20 minutes to set the walls, then 325-350F for the remainder; a dish pie with short crust wants a steady 375F. The book itself specifies two hours.
- Deal with the fatGoose throws a great deal of fat during braising. Chill and lift the fat from the braising liquid, keep it for potatoes, and reduce the remaining liquor to a strong, well-seasoned stock. The "good-sized piece of butter" is there to keep the meat moist; two ounces is ample if you are also adding reduced stock.
- Filling a raised pieRaised pies were commonly eaten cold, and seasoned reduced stock was often poured through the hole in the lid after baking so that it set to jelly as the pie cooled. This text does not mention the practice either way.
- Seasoning'Season' here means at least salt and pepper; sage and onion are the traditional seasonings with goose, and mace or nutmeg appear in some pie fillings of the period. Season the jointed meat generously; cold pie tastes blander than hot.
- Yield and costEight or nine portions, as stated. The 6s. per goose is a period price with no useful modern equivalent; it is quoted here as a housekeeping guide, not a conversion.
Raised goose pie belongs to a long English tradition of large, free-standing crust pies built to be eaten cold and, in earlier centuries, to travel. The most famous of the type was the Yorkshire Christmas pie, in which several boned birds were nested one inside another -- in Hannah Glasse's version a pigeon within a partridge within a fowl within a goose, the whole enclosed in a turkey -- inside a thick hot-water crust, and such pies were sent by carrier to London; the crust functioned as much as packaging as pastry. Cassell's places this entry in a reference dictionary rather than a festive chapter, which suggests how ordinary the dish still was in a late-Victorian household: goose was a bird of Michaelmas and Christmas, and a large pie was one way of turning one carcass into several cold meals. The distinction between a 'green' goose and a stubble goose, taken for granted here, was a real one in the poultry markets of the period, the green bird being the tenderer.