Home › Poultry and Game › Oast Goose with Potato Stuffing
Oast Goose with Potato Stuffing
Singe the goose, wash it carefully in hot water, and wipe it dry before drawing. Then fill it with potato stuffing, stitch up the openings, and truss or tie the goose into shape. If it is not fat, lay thin slices of pork upon the breast, and bake in a hot oven forty-five minutes; but if the goose has considerable fat, omit the pork. Remove the goose from the oven, pour out all the fat, sprinkle the bird all over with salt and pepper, dredge it with flour, and bake again. When the flour is of an attractive color, pour one teacup 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. A small goose should bake at least two hours, if frequently basted; and a large one will require more time in proportion. Remove the goose from the pan, drain off most of the fat, add one-half pint of water, and thicken, if necessary, with browned flour; salt to taste. Garnish the goose with parsley, and serve the gravy in a boat. Apple sauce should always be served with roast goose. Goslings may be roasted in the same way as geese, allowing, however, but fifteen minutes to the pound for cooking.
A straightforward roast, but written for a bird that arrived with pinfeathers and innards intact and for a stove with one heat setting. The technique that matters is the repeated pouring-off of fat and the flour dredge that follows it.
- The bird itself"Singe" and "before drawing" assume an undrawn goose with down still on it. A supermarket goose comes drawn and plucked; check the cavity for the giblet packet, pull any remaining quills with pliers, and skip straight to the stuffing. Most retail geese run 8-12 lb and feed six to eight, since the frame is large and the meat yield low relative to a turkey.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" in period usage is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. That suits the first 45 minutes, which is there to render the subcutaneous fat, but the long second stage is better run at 325-350F or the skin blackens before the legs are done.
- Pour out all the fatThis is the hinge. A goose throws off two to three cups of fat, and if it sits in the pan the drippings scorch and the bird steams rather than crisps. Drain it into a heatproof jar each time you baste. Strained and refrigerated, it keeps for months and is the best fat there is for roast potatoes.
- Teacup and half-pintThe book does not define a teacup; it is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, roughly 3/4 cup or 175 ml. The half-pint of water for the gravy is 8 fl oz in American measure.
- Dredge with flourThe flour sifted over the wet skin browns into a thin crust and, as the text says, absorbs surface fat. Use a fine sieve and a light hand; a heavy dusting turns pasty. The instruction to dredge at every basting is worth following.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, kept in a jar as a standing pantry item. It thickens less than raw flour, so allow roughly half again as much, and it gives the gravy colour without the raw-paste taste.
- Timing and donenessTwo hours for a small goose is in the right range, but go by temperature: 165-170F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone. The 15-minutes-per-pound figure given for goslings runs short for a modern refrigerated bird, and stuffing inside the cavity must also reach 165F.
- Stuffed cavityPotato stuffing packed into a goose sits in a dense, slow-heating mass. If you would rather not roast to the higher temperature that a stuffed bird demands, bake the stuffing separately in a dish moistened with some of the rendered goose fat.
- RestingThe recipe carves straight from the pan. Give the goose 20 minutes under loose foil; it is a fatty bird and the juices redistribute noticeably.
Goose was the older festive bird in both Britain and America, holding the place turkey later took: it fattened on stubble after harvest, it was cheap to keep on common ground, and in Britain it arrived at table at Michaelmas and again at Christmas. Potato stuffing rather than bread or chestnut is often associated with the German and Irish kitchens that shaped much of nineteenth-century American home cooking, where mashed potato bound with onion, sage and goose fat filled the cavity and soaked up what the bird rendered. The insistence that "apple sauce should always be served" is not decoration but good sense — sharp fruit cuts an extremely fatty meat, which is why goose has been paired with apple, and duck with orange or cherry, for centuries. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued this book as part of a run of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class household that bought its sewing patterns, and its poultry chapter still assumes a cook who can singe and draw a bird herself.