Home › Meats and Poultry › Roast Goose
Roast Goose
Select a young goose weighing eight to ten pounds. Wash and scrub the skin thoroughly and cleanse with warm water.
Wipe the fowl dry and stuff with six potatoes boiled and mashed, mixed with one teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of white pepper, one teaspoon of sage, one tablespoon of onion juice and two tablespoons of butter. Never stuff poultry of any kind full, but leave some room for the stuffing to swell. Sew and truss the goose and steam it for one-half hour to draw out the oil. Then place in a pan, dredge with salt, pepper and flour and roast in the oven, pouring in a little hot water when it begins to brown, and basting often. Cook for about one hour and a half, or until brown and tender. Remove the goose to a hot platter, pour off the oil in the pan and make a brown gravy with flour and water, as for roast turkey. Garnish the goose with celery tops or cress, and serve with brown gravy in a gravy boat, and cider apple sauce.
A straightforward roast, but the original gives no oven temperature and a roasting time that runs short for a stuffed bird of this size. Cook to temperature, not to the clock.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated. Start at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder. A goose has enough fat that high heat throughout will scorch the drippings.
- Time and donenessAn hour and a half will not bring an 8-10 lb stuffed goose through. Reckon on 2 to 2.5 hours after the steaming, and check with a thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh and 165F in the centre of the stuffing.
- The steaming stepThis is the hinge of the recipe. Half an hour of steam renders a good deal of the subcutaneous fat and firms the skin so it crisps rather than sags. A modern equivalent is to prick the skin all over (not into the meat) and pour a kettle of boiling water over the bird, then dry it well. Either way the bird must be thoroughly dry before it goes in the oven.
- Stuffing a gooseThe instruction to leave room is sound but the deeper problem is that stuffing inside a fatty bird sits in the danger zone for a long time. Baking the potato stuffing separately in a dish, moistened with a ladle of skimmed goose fat, gives a better result and removes the timing conflict.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: grate an onion and press it through a sieve, or squeeze the pulp in cheesecloth. A tablespoon is roughly what a small onion will give, though the yield varies a good deal. Grated onion cooked briefly in the butter works as well.
- Six potatoesAmbiguous by modern standards. Take it as about 2 lb of floury potatoes, boiled and mashed dry with no milk added, which gives roughly 4 cups of stuffing.
- Dredging with flourFlouring the skin was common practice in cookery of this period, and the recipe follows it. With a modern oven it is optional and can make the skin patchy; salt and pepper alone are enough.
- The rendered fatA goose of this size will give up a good deal of clean fat, often a couple of cups or more, though some has already gone in the steaming. Pour it off through a sieve into a jar and keep it refrigerated for potatoes and confit. Only the dark pan residue below it should go into the gravy.
- YieldA goose carries less meat for its weight than a turkey. An 8-10 lb bird will serve four to six, perhaps more with a generous stuffing and sides.
Goose was the standard festive roast in Britain and much of northern Europe long before the turkey displaced it, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries kept it on the list, commonly in connection with Michaelmas and Christmas tables. The pairing with apple in some acid form -- here cider apple sauce -- is old and practical: goose is among the fattest of table birds, and sharp fruit cuts it. The potato stuffing rather than a bread one points the same direction, since dry mashed potato absorbs fat from the cavity as the bird cooks. The steaming step, which looks fussy now, is aimed at what the recipe itself calls drawing out the oil; similar instructions can be found in other cookbooks of the period.