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Roast Goose
Get a goose that is not more than eight months old, and the fatter it is the more juicy the meat. The dressing should be made of three pints of bread crumbs, six ounces of butter substitute, a teaspoonful each of sage, black pepper and salt and chopped onions. Don't stuff very full, but sew very closely so that the fat will not get in. Place in a baking pan with a little water and baste often with a little salt, water and vinegar. Turn the goose frequently SO that it may be evenly browned. Bake about two and one-half hours. When done, take it from the pan, drain off the fat and add the chopped giblets, which have previously been boiled tender, together with the water in which they were done. Thicken with barley flour and drippings rubbed together; let boil, and serve.
A straightforward roast with a bread stuffing and a giblet gravy. Most of what needs translating is the bird itself and the fat it gives off.
- Buying the birdSupermarket geese run 8-12 lb and are almost always young; the eight-month limit was most likely a warning against tough old breeding stock. Allow generously: a 10 lb goose feeds about four to six, since the carcass is heavy relative to the meat.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Goose is usually started hot, around 425F for 30 minutes to open the fat, then dropped to 325-350F for the remainder. Two and a half hours suits a bird of about 10 lb; the thigh joint should reach 165-175F.
- Butter substituteThis means margarine or a vegetable shortening, common in period cookbooks written when butter was dear. Plain butter works and tastes better; goose fat rendered from the bird is better still.
- Prick the skin, and drainThe hinge of the dish. A goose can throw off two or more cups of fat. Prick the skin over the breast and thighs before roasting and ladle the fat out of the pan as it collects, or the bird sits and fries in it. Save the fat -- it keeps for months refrigerated.
- Three pints of crumbsSix cups, loosely packed, which is generous for a 10 lb bird. Fill the cavity loosely as instructed; dense stuffing inside a bird takes longer to reach a safe temperature than the meat around it. Stuffing should register 165F, or bake the surplus in a separate dish.
- The basting liquidSalt, water and a little vinegar; whatever was intended by it, the acid helps cut richness. Keep the water in the pan shallow; a deep bath steams the underside.
- Turning the birdPractical over an open hearth or in an unreliable range. In a modern oven, roast breast up and turn only once or twice if browning is uneven.
- Barley flour gravyBarley flour thickens less firmly than wheat and gives a slightly cloudy, nutty gravy. Wheat flour substitutes one for one; use roughly 2 tablespoons flour rubbed into 2 tablespoons fat per cup of giblet liquid, and simmer a few minutes to lose the raw taste.
Roast goose was the festive bird of the English-speaking table long before turkey displaced it, tied to Michaelmas in September and to Christmas dinner through the nineteenth century -- the goose club, into which working households paid a few pence a week toward a bird, was a fixture of Victorian city life. The instructions here are less about flavoring than about coping with fat, which is the whole difficulty of the bird. The call for a "butter substitute" and for barley flour rather than wheat suggests a household economizing, or the wartime and near-wartime years when wheat and butter were being conserved.