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Roast Goose with Potato Stuffing
Singe, remove pinfeathers, wash and scrub a goose in hot soapsuds; then draw (which is removing inside contents). Wash in cold water and wipe. Stuff, truss, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and lay six thin strips fat salt pork over breast. Place on rack in dripping-pan, put in hot oven, and bake two hours. Baste every fifteen minutes with fat in pan. Remove pork last half-hour of cooking. Place on platter, cut string, and remove string and skewers. Garnish with watercress and bright red cranberries. Serve with Apple Sauce.
The instructions assume a bird sold whole with feathers and viscera still in place, and an oven controlled only by feel. Two details matter most: the enormous quantity of fat a goose renders, and the fact that two hours at a single high heat will not reliably bring a large bird to a safe temperature.
- Buying the birdGeese now come drawn, plucked and often frozen. A supermarket goose runs 8-12 lb and feeds 6 to 8 because the carcass is heavy in proportion to its meat. Skip the singeing and the soapsuds; a rinse and a thorough drying is enough, though it is worth pulling out any remaining pinfeathers with tweezers.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no thermometer readings, and period usage put a hot oven somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Modern practice starts a goose hot for 20-30 minutes to set the skin, then drops to 325-350F for the remainder, which prevents the breast drying out while the legs finish.
- Time and temperatureTwo hours is short for anything over 9 lb. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the breast and 175F at the thigh joint, roughly 20 minutes per pound at 325-350F after the initial blast. A stuffed bird takes longer still, and the stuffing itself must reach 165F.
- The salt pork is optionalA modern goose carries a thick subcutaneous fat layer and largely bastes itself. Prick the skin over the breast and thighs instead, so the fat can escape and the skin crisps.
- Manage the fatA goose can throw a quart or more of fat. Use a deep dripping-pan with a rack, and ladle fat off two or three times during roasting or it will smoke and may catch. Strain and refrigerate it; goose fat keeps for months and is the best thing you will ever fry a potato in.
- BastingEvery fifteen minutes is more than needed with rendered goose fat pooling in the pan, and each door opening costs heat. Every 30-40 minutes is plenty.
- Potato stuffingThe title points to a stuffing given elsewhere in the book, based on mashed potato with salt pork or butter, onion, sage and egg. Because it is dense and moist, it heats slowly. Baking it in a separate dish gives a better result and a faster bird.
- Resting and servingLet the goose stand 20 minutes under loose foil before carving. Apple sauce is not decoration here; goose is rich, and the acid is the point.
Goose was the standard festival roast in Britain and much of northern Europe long before turkey displaced it, and it survived in American cookbooks of Fannie Farmer's era as a Christmas and Michaelmas dish rather than an everyday one. The potato stuffing is often taken as a sign of northern European inheritance: mashed potato is generally associated with German, Irish and Scandinavian cooking where an English cook would have used breadcrumbs or sage and onion, though the route by which the combination reached New England kitchens is a matter of inference rather than record. The instruction to scrub the bird in hot soapsuds looks startling now, but it reflects a time when poultry arrived from the market undrawn and unwashed, sometimes still bloodied from the yard, and the cook's first job was to make it clean. The apple sauce and cranberries are doing the same work as the sharp fruit sauces served with fat roast meats since the medieval period, cutting through a notably fatty bird.