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Roast Goose with Apple Dressing
1 goose. 1 tablespoon browned flour. 1 tablespoon butter. 1/2 doz. apples. 1/2 cup sugar.
Rub goose with salt, pepper, butter and flour. Cook apples, mash, add sugar and stuff goose. Roast, allowing 20 minutes to the pound.
Mrs. Wilson assumes a cook who already knows what a goose does in a hot oven, which is render several cups of fat. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature she never gives and the roasting time, which is close to double what a goose needs.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. Start at 425F for about 30 minutes to set the skin and get the fat moving, then drop to 325F for the remainder. A goose cooked at one steady high heat scorches long before the legs are done.
- The time is too longTwenty minutes to the pound on a 12 lb goose is four hours, which will leave the breast dry and stringy. Modern practice is roughly 15 minutes per pound at 325F after the initial blast, and then cook to temperature rather than to the clock: 165F in the thickest part of the breast, 175F in the thigh.
- Prick the skinThe single thing that decides whether the bird is good. Prick or score the fatty areas over the breast and thighs before roasting, and pour off the accumulated fat two or three times during cooking. Otherwise the skin sits in its own grease and never crisps. Save the fat for potatoes.
- Browned flourPlain flour toasted dry in a skillet until the color of weak coffee, then cooled. It was a pantry staple used for gravy color and a faintly nutty flavor. Rubbed on the outside here, it darkens the skin; make a couple of tablespoons at once and keep the rest.
- The dressing is applesauceHalf a dozen apples cooked down, mashed and sweetened with half a cup of sugar is a wet, sweet purée rather than a bread stuffing. Use a firm cooking apple, cook it fairly dry, and taste before adding all the sugar. If you stuff the cavity with it, the mass must reach 165F, which lengthens the roast considerably; spooning it into the cavity loosely, or serving it alongside as a sauce, gives a better result.
- Size and yieldA market goose runs 10 to 14 lb and carries far more bone and fat than a turkey of the same weight. Figure on serving six to eight people, not twelve.
- Resting and carvingRest the bird 20 to 30 minutes before carving. Goose legs are dense and dark and are best removed whole, then sliced off the bone; carve the breast in long thin slices parallel to the keel.
Goose was the standard festival roast in Britain and much of northern Europe long before turkey displaced it, and the apple pairing is old and practical: the fruit's acidity cuts a bird that is extraordinarily fatty, which is also why goose so often appears with sauerkraut, prunes or sour cherries in central European cooking. What is striking here is the form of the dressing. By 1920, when Mary A. Wilson was writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer and assembling this book, many American goose recipes called for a bread, onion and sage stuffing; a cavity packed with sweetened apple purée is closer to a sauce cooked inside the bird. Wilson's compression is characteristic of the whole volume, which came out of newspaper columns and wartime food-conservation work and assumes a reader who needs the proportions rather than the procedure.