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Roast Goose with Baked Apple
I eight-pound goose
¼ teaspoon sage
2 cups bread-crums
1 teaspoon salt
I chopped onion
Pinch of pepper
2 tablespoons fat
6 to 8 apples
3 sweet potatoes
¼ cup brown sugar
Cook the giblets until tender, chop and add to stuffing made by mixing bread-crums, onion, fat, sage, salt and pepper. After cleaning and washing the goose thoroughly, stuff, and sew the neck and back. Roast very slowly (350-400° F.), about three hours. Wash and core six to eight apples; sprinkle with sugar, stuff with mashed and seasoned sweet potato. Bake until tender and serve hot with the goose.
A straightforward holiday roast, but goose behaves nothing like turkey: it carries an enormous layer of subcutaneous fat that has to be given somewhere to go. Manage the fat and the rest follows.
- Score the skin firstPrick or lightly score the breast and thighs through the skin but not into the meat, and set the bird on a rack over a deep pan. An eight-pound goose will render a good deal of fat — often two or three cups; without a rack the underside stews in it and the skin stays flabby. Pour the fat off partway through and keep it — it is excellent for frying potatoes.
- The stated oven temperatureThe original calls 350–400°F "very slowly," which reflects the range language of its own period rather than modern practice. In a modern oven, 325–350°F for the bulk of the time, with a final 15–20 minutes at 425°F to crisp the skin, gives a better result than three hours at 400°F.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree hours is a reasonable estimate for eight pounds, but goose is dark meat throughout and is judged by thermometer: 165°F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Stuffing inside the cavity must also reach 165°F, which is the real reason a stuffed bird takes longer.
- Bread-crumsThis means dry crumbs from stale bread torn or grated by hand, not the fine sandy commercial kind. Two cups of coarse crumbs is a modest amount of stuffing for an eight-pound bird — enough to flavour the cavity, not to fill it. Do not pack it tight; it needs room to take up steam.
- GibletsSimmer heart, gizzard and neck 45 minutes to an hour and the liver only 10 minutes at the end, then chop. The cooking liquid is worth keeping for gravy made with the poured-off pan juices.
- Sewing the birdButcher's twine and a trussing needle do the job the recipe assumes. If you would rather not sew, skewer the neck flap and cavity closed, or bake the stuffing separately in a dish moistened with a little goose fat and stock — it browns better and removes the timing problem.
- The applesUse a firm baking variety that holds shape, such as Rome, Braeburn or Granny Smith; softer dessert apples collapse into sauce. Three sweet potatoes, boiled and mashed, will fill six to eight cored apples. Bake them 35–45 minutes at 350°F, separately from the goose so they are not sitting in fat.
- YieldAn eight-pound goose serves about four to six, less generously than the weight suggests — the frame is large and the fat loss substantial. Allow roughly a pound and a half of raw bird per person.
Goose was the ordinary festive bird across northern Europe; Michaelmas geese in England and the Christmas goose of Dickens both belong to a farming calendar in which birds were fattened on stubble after harvest. The pairing with apple is older than any single recipe and entirely practical — the acid cuts the fat, which is why goose, duck and pork all end up beside apples in one form or another. What marks this version as American and of its moment is the sweet potato filling in the baked apples, which turns the garnish into a vegetable course. Butterick's book was published for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers.