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Pea Fowls
These fowls are cooked the same as turkeys, or larded with shreds of bacon, trussed and roasted one and onefourth hours. BRAISED GOSLINGS À LA MARION HARLAND - Clean and truss without stuffing. Prepare a bed for them by slicing a carrot, an onion, a turnip, also a pared apple, and cutting a stalk of celery into bits. With these, cover the grating of your roaster; lay the birds upon them, dredge with salt, pepper and a little powdered sage, when you have poured a little boiling water over them from the kettle. Cover, and roast slowly fifteen minutes to the pound. Brush with butter, dredge with flour and brown.
Take the goslings up and keep hot while you make the gravy. Rub vegetables and liquor through a colander into a bowl. Set this in cold water to throw up the grease. Skim, thicken with browned flour, adding two teaspoons of tomato catsup, boil up and serve.
Serve apple sauce and green peas, or Lima beans, with the goslings, which are most eatable when half-grown. R
Two recipes run together here: a one-line note on roasting peafowl, and Marion Harland's braised goslings. The gosling instructions are the substantial ones, and the timing is where they need the most attention.
- Sourcing the birdsPeafowl are farmed for meat in small numbers and can be ordered from specialty game suppliers; the meat is lean and dry, which is presumably why the recipe offers larding with bacon as an alternative to plain roasting. A young turkey of similar weight behaves much the same in the oven. Goslings sold today are often 8-12 lb dressed, heavier than the "half-grown" birds Harland preferred.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockFifteen minutes to the pound in a slow oven will not reliably bring a goose to a safe internal temperature, and the same is true of the peafowl's flat hour and a quarter. Use an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and take the bird to 165F. Rest fifteen minutes before carving.
- "Roaster" and "grating"A covered oval tin roaster with a perforated inner rack. A heavy covered Dutch oven or a roasting pan with a rack and a foil lid does the same job: the vegetables sit under the rack, the bird above, steam trapped inside.
- Slow ovenHeat -- The recipe says only to "roast slowly"; it gives no oven term at all. Something in the region of 300-325F suits the covered stage. Uncover and raise the heat, or run the broiler briefly, for the final browning after the butter-and-flour dredge.
- Larding with bacon shredsStrips of fat drawn through the breast with a larding needle, not draped over the top. Barding — tying thin sheets of bacon or fatback across the breast and removing them for the last twenty minutes — achieves nearly the same result without the equipment.
- DredgeIn this period it means to sprinkle or dust, not to coat in a dish of flour. A light shower of flour over the buttered skin is what produces the crust.
- Skimming the gravySetting the bowl in cold water to "throw up the grease" works, but a fat separator or twenty minutes in the refrigerator is faster. A gosling throws off a great deal of fat; save it, as goose fat keeps for months refrigerated and is excellent for potatoes.
- Browned flour and catsupBrowned flour is plain flour toasted dry in a skillet until nut-coloured, which thickens less per spoonful than raw flour — expect to use half again as much. The tomato catsup of the period was generally thinner, sharper and less sweet than the modern bottle; two teaspoons of today's ketchup will read sweeter, so consider a splash of vinegar alongside.
- YieldA 10 lb gosling will serve perhaps six to eight, less generously than the weight suggests — geese carry heavy frames and a great deal of fat. The stray "R" at the end of the text is a printer's mark, not part of the recipe.
Peafowl belong to a long European tradition of serving showy birds at grand tables, where the point was as much display as eating; by the time this book appeared they had largely dropped out of American cookery, and the entry's brevity — essentially "treat it like a turkey" — shows how marginal they had become. The recipe attached to it carries a name that would have sold the page on its own: Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, one of the most widely read American domestic writers of the later nineteenth century, whose Common Sense in the Household (1871) went through edition after edition. Her preference for the half-grown gosling reflects standard practice of the period, when a "green goose" of a few months was eaten in early summer and older birds were held back for Michaelmas and Christmas; the apple sauce and green peas served alongside are the conventional English accompaniments, brought over intact.