Wild Goose
After the goose is dressed, soak it several hours in salt and water. Put a small onion inside and plunge it into boiling water for twenty minutes. Stuff with chopped celery, chopped eggs, mashed potatoes, bits of fat pork or other cold meat; a little butter; raw turnip grated; a tablespoonful of pepper vinegar; a little chopped onion; pepper and salt to the taste. A teacup of stock or broth must be put in the pan with the fowl. Butter it, dredge with flour, and baste often. Pin a buttered paper over the breast to prevent its becoming hard. Serve with mushroom or celery sauce, or, for a simpler taste, serve merely with its own gravy.--Mrs. T. Wild Goose. Put a small onion inside, a slice of pork, pepper, salt, and a spoonful of red wine.
Lay in a pan with water enough to make gravy. Dredge with flour, and baste with butter frequently. Cook quickly and serve with gravy made as for wild turkey.
Two versions of the same bird, one elaborate and one plain, neither giving a temperature or a roasting time. Wild goose is dark, lean and strongly flavoured, and almost everything here is aimed at that.
- "Dressed" and the salt soakDressed means plucked, singed and drawn, not stuffed. The several hours in salt and water is a brine that draws blood from the dark flesh and softens the gamy edge; a few hours in a gallon of water with about half a cup of salt does the same job, refrigerated.
- The twenty-minute plungeEffectively a blanch rather than the main cooking. Parboiling of this kind was used to firm the bird and take the edge off a strong flavour, and it will render a little surface fat. Wild geese carry far less fat than a farmed bird, so do not expect the fat cap a domestic goose gives up.
- Oven heatNeither version names one, and the book gives no temperatures anywhere. 'Cook quickly' implies a brisk oven; in modern terms roughly 425-450F for the first 20 minutes to set the skin, then 350F for the remainder, is a workable reading.
- DonenessA wild goose breast is best taken to about 135F and rested, but a stuffed bird cannot be handled that way. If you stuff it, both the thigh and the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F, which will overcook the breast. Roasting the stuffing separately in a dish is the sensible compromise.
- Pepper vinegarThe hot-pepper vinegar of a Southern larder: small red peppers steeped in cider vinegar. Any bottled pepper vinegar works, or a tablespoon of cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne.
- A teacup of stockPeriod teacup measures vary; reckon somewhere between half a cup and a cup. It is there to keep the pan from scorching and to build gravy, and will need topping up during a long roast.
- The buttered paperThe hinge of the first version. A sheet of buttered parchment pinned over the breast keeps the lean meat from drying and hardening under direct heat; foil does the same but reflects more, so remove it for the last quarter hour to colour the skin.
- Grated raw turnipUnusual in a stuffing now, but it releases moisture as it cooks and lightens what would otherwise be a heavy mash of potato and pork. Do not substitute cooked turnip; the point is the raw water content.
- YieldA wild Canada goose dresses out at roughly 5 to 8 lb and feeds four to six, rather less generously than the weight suggests, since the carcass is large in proportion to the meat.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (variously dated 1878 and 1879, depending on the edition) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why this entry ends with the abbreviated name Mrs. T. and why the same dish appears twice, the second version stripped down to onion, pork, wine and gravy. Wild goose in a Virginia kitchen was hunted, not bought, and the treatment reflects that: a long soak in salt water to draw the blood, a rich stuffing of pork and potato to supply the fat the bird lacks, and a buttered paper over the breast because lean wild fowl hardens where a farmyard goose would baste itself. Pepper vinegar and celery sauce suggest the Tidewater South, where bottled hot-pepper vinegar was, by tradition, a fixture of the table and celery was a winter garden crop worth cooking into a sauce.