Home › The Principles of Cookery › Goose, to Truss, for Roasting
Goose, to Truss, for Roasting
Pluck the goose. Carefully remove the quill-sockets, and singe off the hairs. Cut off the neck close to the back, leaving the skin long enough to turn over. After drawing, wash and wipe the bird both inside and out, and cut off the feet and pinions at the first joint. Pull out the throat, and tie the end securely. Beat the breast-bone flat with a rolling-pin. Draw the legs up closely, and put a skewer through them and through the body, and another through the pinions and through the body. Cut off the end of the vent, and make a hole in the skin large enough for the rump to go through. This will prevent the seasoning escaping.
This is a butchery and trussing procedure rather than a cooked dish, written for a household that took delivery of a bird in feather. Most of it can be skipped if you buy a goose oven-ready; the parts worth keeping are the breastbone and the vent.
- The hinge: flatten the breastboneBeating the breast-bone flat with a rolling-pin is the step that still matters. A goose has a deep keel, and flattening it lets the bird sit level, cook evenly and carve into broad slices instead of narrow slivers. Do it with the bird breast-up on a board, using steady blows rather than one hard one.
- Quill-sockets and singeingEven a shop-bought goose usually carries stubs of pin feathers along the breast and thighs. Pull them with tweezers or the edge of a small knife against your thumb, then pass the skin briefly over a gas flame or use a kitchen torch to take off the hair-like filoplumes.
- "Drawing" and "the throat"Drawing means removing the viscera through the vent. Pulling out the throat means drawing the windpipe, gullet and crop out through the neck opening before tying the neck skin over. Oven-ready birds have had all of this done, but check the neck cavity for the crop lining, which is sometimes left behind.
- PinionsThe pinion is the wing tip, the outermost joint. Cutting it off at the first joint keeps it from scorching. Keep the tips, along with the neck and giblets, for stock or gravy.
- Skewers versus stringVictorian trussing used metal poultry skewers driven right through the bird, with string wound round the projecting ends. Butcher's twine alone works: tie the legs together at the ankles and pull the wings tight against the body with a loop under the back.
- The vent trickCutting the end of the vent and pushing the rump through a slit in the skin is a neat closure that needs no string and holds the stuffing in. It works exactly as described; a couple of small skewers laced with twine does the same job.
- Size and yieldA goose carries far more fat and bone than a turkey of the same weight. Reckon on around 1 1/2 lb of dressed bird per person, so a 10-12 lb goose feeds six to eight. Expect to pour off a good deal of rendered fat during roasting, often a pint or more.
- Cooking on from hereThe book gives trussing only. Roast at 425F for the first 30 minutes, then 325F, pricking the skin along the thighs and flanks to release fat, and take the thigh to 170-175F on a thermometer. Goose is dark meat and is not pleasant underdone.
Cassell's assumes a bird arriving whole and in feather, which is why the entry opens with plucking rather than seasoning: until refrigeration and centralised dressing, poultry reached the kitchen as close to alive as the household could manage, and the cook was also the butcher. Goose was the great British festival bird before the turkey displaced it, eaten at Michaelmas at the end of September, when stubble-fed geese were at their fattest, and again at Christmas; goose clubs, into which working families paid a few pence a week through the year, were a common feature of Victorian towns. The trussing method here, with skewers driven through the body and the rump pushed through a slit in the vent skin, is the standard English technique of the period. The instruction to flatten the breastbone matters most with goose and duck, whose deep keel would otherwise leave the bird rocking on the dish and awkward to carve at table, where carving was still done in front of the company.