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Roast Goose with Potato Stuffing
I goose (about 8 pounds)
Salt and pepper
Potato stuffing
Flour
Salt pork if goose is not fat
Select a goose that is about four months old; an old goose is better braized than roasted. Singe the goose, wash it carefully in hot water, and wipe it dry before drawing it. Flatten the breast-bone by striking it with a rolling-pin. Partly fill the goose with potato stuffing, stitch up the openings and truss it. If it is not fat, lay thin slices of pork upon the breast, but if the goose has considerable fat, omit the pork. Bake in a hot oven (400- 480° F.) for forty-five minutes, remove it from the oven, pour out all the fat, sprinkle the bird all over with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and return it to the oven.
When the flour is a good brown, pour one cup of hot water into the pan and baste the goose often, dredging it each time with a slight sifting of flour to absorb the fat. Allow eighteen minutes to the pound for a young goose and twenty-five for one that is old. Remove the goose from the pan, add a cup of hot water to the gravy and thicken it, if necessary, with browned flour. Garnish the goose with parsley and serve with giblet gravy. Apple sauce is often served with roast goose.
Goslings may be roasted in the same way, allowing, however, only fifteen minutes to the pound for cooking.
A workable method, but written for a bird you butchered yourself and an oven with one setting. The two things to change are the temperature after the first stage and the reliance on minutes per pound.
- The hinge: render the fat first, then drop the heatThe initial blast at 400-480F and the pouring-off of fat is the whole point of the method and worth keeping for the first 45 minutes. After that, roast at 325-350F rather than returning the bird to the same fierce heat, pouring off the accumulated fat every 30-40 minutes; goose gives up an enormous amount and a pan of hot grease at high heat is both a fire risk and the cause of scorched skin over undercooked thigh.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockEighteen minutes to the pound puts an 8 lb goose at about 2 hours 25 minutes, which is roughly right, but geese vary hugely in fat and bone. Take the thickest part of the thigh to 170-175F, which reads well done on a thermometer but is where dark, well-worked goose leg actually becomes tender. If the bird is stuffed, the centre of the stuffing must also reach 165F.
- Salt pork is almost certainly unnecessaryDomestic geese sold today are bred fat; the barding recommended for a lean farm bird will only add grease. Skip it unless you have a genuinely lean wild or heritage bird.
- You will not be singeing or drawing itA supermarket or butcher's goose arrives plucked and eviscerated. Ask for the giblets, since the recipe assumes them for gravy. Do prick the skin all over with a fork or skewer before roasting to help the fat escape.
- Flattening the breast-boneStriking the keel with a rolling-pin was done to make the bird sit level and roast evenly. It is optional; loosely trussing the legs and turning the bird once during roasting achieves the same thing without cracked bone in the meat.
- The dredging trickSifting flour over the wet skin at each basting was a way to blot fat and build colour before ovens had reliable control. It works, but a light hand only; heavy dredging gives a pasty crust. Skipping it entirely and simply not basting also produces excellent crisp skin.
- Potato stuffing is a separate recipeThe book assumes you will turn to its potato stuffing given elsewhere. Any mashed-potato stuffing with onion, sage and goose fat suits; count on roughly 4-5 cups for an 8 lb bird, packed loosely, and consider baking the surplus in a dish where it will brown.
- Save the fat, and know the yieldPour the rendered fat through a strainer into a jar; refrigerated, it keeps for months and is the best medium there is for roast potatoes. An 8 lb goose is mostly frame and fat and serves about six, not the eight a chicken of that weight would.
Goose was a leading festive roast in the English-speaking world before the turkey largely displaced it, and a potato stuffing points to the Northern European and Irish-American end of American cookery, where mashed potato with onion and sage did work that breadcrumbs or apples did elsewhere. The recipe's insistence on a bird about four months old reflects a period when geese were bought by age and season rather than by weight from a case: a spring-hatched gosling came to table in autumn, and an older bird was tough enough to need braising, which is exactly what the headnote says. Butterick's cookery titles belong to the early twentieth century, when a household of this kind might still expect to singe and draw its own poultry, and the instruction to pour off the fat is not fussiness but thrift, since goose grease was a prized cooking medium and was also used as a folk chest rub.