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Sage, Onion, and Apple Stuffing for Geese, Pork, and Ducks
Put four apples, four onions, four sage-leaves, and four lemon-thyme leaves into a saucepan with as much water as will cover them. Let them simmer till tender, then pour off the water, and rub them through a sieve. Season the pulp with pepper and salt, mix with it as much mashed potato as will make it dry and smooth, and the stuffing will be ready for use. If liked, a spoonful of boiled rice may be mixed with the sage, etc., instead of the potatoes. Time, an hour or more. Probable cost, about 4d. Sufficient for one goose or two ducks.
A wet-cooked stuffing rather than a bread one, and unusually mild for a Victorian goose forcemeat. It comes together in an hour with almost no attention.
- The apples and onionsUse a tart cooking apple that collapses — Bramley, Granny Smith at a push — and medium yellow onions, peeled and quartered. Dessert apples hold their shape and will not sieve properly.
- Four sage leaves is not a misprint, but it is faintFour leaves of modern cultivated sage will barely register against four apples and four onions. Six to ten leaves gives the flavour the name promises; taste the pulp before you bind it.
- Lemon-thyme leavesThe original specifies individual leaves, which is a vanishingly small amount. Two or three sprigs, stripped, is closer to a usable quantity.
- Rub through a sieveA food mill or a coarse drum sieve does this in a minute. A blender makes it gluey; if you use one, pulse rather than run it.
- Drain hardThe success of this stuffing rests on getting the pulp dry. Pour off the cooking water, then let the pulp sit in the sieve or return it to the dry pan over low heat to steam off moisture before you add potato. Wet pulp will need far more potato than you want.
- The potato is a binder, not a fillerPlain mashed potato with no butter or milk, added a spoonful at a time until the mixture is thick enough to hold a shape. Boiled rice, the alternative given, works the same way and gives a looser texture.
- Cost and quantityFourpence marked this as an economy stuffing — no bread, no suet, no eggs. The recipe gives it as sufficient for one goose or two ducks.
- Stuffing a birdModern practice is to cook stuffing in a separate dish, or to check that any stuffing left inside a goose or duck reaches 74C/165F at the centre. Packed loosely, this one also crisps well spread in a shallow tin under the roasting rack, where it catches the fat.
Sage and onion is the fixed English partner to fatty roast birds and to pork, and the logic is straightforward: the alliums and the resinous herb cut through goose and duck fat, while apple supplies the acidity that a rich bird wants. Cassell's gives this version without bread or suet, which is what makes it cheap — most nineteenth-century sage and onion stuffings are built on breadcrumbs bound with egg and fat. Using boiled potato or rice as the binder appears to have been a domestic economy, and it produces a softer, more sauce-like stuffing than the crumbed kind. The inclusion of lemon thyme points to a kitchen with a herb bed rather than a shop; it was a standard garden plant in Victorian England.