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Roasted Goose and Chestnut Stuffing
Peel fifty chestnuts, chop them up as small as possible, put them into a saucepan with two ounces of butter, half a pound of sausage meat, half an onion finely chopped, a little minced parsley and a very small quantity of garlic. Set the saucepan on the fire and cook for ten minutes. Scald and chop finely the liver of a goose, add it to the chestnut mixture and cook gently for a quarter of an hour. Prepare a goose, stuff it with the mixture and roast it in a hot oven. Boil gently fifty more chestnuts in white wine, adding any required seasoning and cooking them until tender but not broken. When the goose is done put it on a dish, garnish with the boiled chestnuts, and serve.
Oscar gives the stuffing in detail and the bird almost as an afterthought — no weight, no temperature, no time. Those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: render the fatA goose carries far more subcutaneous fat than a turkey. Prick the skin all over the breast and thighs before roasting and pour the drippings off two or three times during cooking, or the stuffing sits in grease and the skin never crisps. Save the fat; it keeps for months refrigerated.
- Oven temperaturePeriod cookery tables generally put a "hot oven" somewhere around 400-450F. Start high for 20-30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325-350F for the rest. A 10 lb goose needs roughly 2½ to 3 hours total.
- DonenessThe original gives none. Take the thigh to 175F and check that the center of the stuffing has reached 165F — stuffing inside a bird lags well behind the meat, which is why many cooks now bake it in a separate dish and simply garnish the cavity.
- Fifty chestnutsReckon roughly 30-45 chestnuts in the shell to the pound depending on size, so this calls for something in the region of 2½ to 3 lb in all, split between stuffing and garnish. Peeled vacuum-packed or jarred chestnuts, which yield about 12 oz for every pound in shell, save an hour of tedium and work perfectly here.
- PeelingScore an X in the flat side, roast at 425F for 15–20 minutes or boil 10 minutes, and peel while still hot. Both shell and the inner brown pellicle must come off; the pellicle is bitter and does not soften.
- Goose liverIf the bird comes without its giblets, two or three chicken livers, scalded and chopped as directed, will stand in, though they are milder than goose liver.
- Sausage meatThis means plain bulk pork sausage, uncased and unsweetened. Avoid sage-heavy or maple breakfast blends, which will fight the chestnut.
- The wine chestnutsAllow about 2 cups of dry white wine, barely simmering, and stop the moment a nut yields to a skewer — the instruction "tender but not broken" is the whole point of the garnish.
- YieldA 10–12 lb goose serves six to eight, with rather less meat than the size suggests.
Goose with chestnuts is a northern European winter dish, and the treatment here — chestnut and sausage forcemeat inside, whole chestnuts cooked in wine around the platter — sits comfortably within late nineteenth-century French garniture practice. Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf in 1893, when roast goose was still a fixture of Christmas and New Year menus in New York, particularly among German-American families for whom Gänsebraten was the holiday centerpiece. The recipe's silences are characteristic of the book, which assumes a reader who already knows how a goose behaves in a hotel range. Chestnuts were then cheap and abundant in the eastern United States; the blight that destroyed the American chestnut was first identified in New York in 1904, and within a few decades the nuts in an American kitchen were mostly imported.