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Smoked Goose
Pluck a goose as soon as killed, remove all the back, together with the bone attached to it, take out the inside of the remainder of the bird, wash and dry it, open it out flat, rub well with a mixture of salt, saltpeter and honey, and leave for a couple of days; then rub it over with powdered thyme, allspice, garlic and white pepper and leave it for another two days; then sew it up, first in muslin and then in thick cloth, and hang it for a week over a wood fire. Take it down, remove the thick cloth, and put it in a cool current of air for three days; then remove the muslin, sew it up in more muslin and place in a cool room until wanted. The back part that was taken away may be used for stew or broth.
This is a dry cure followed by a week of cold smoking and several weeks of ambient hanging, and it is written entirely without weights, temperatures or times that can be checked. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen; the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- No measured cureThe salt, saltpeter and honey are given only as "a mixture" rubbed on by hand. Curing safety depends on the ratio of salt and nitrate to the weight of the meat, and that ratio is the whole of the protection here. Without it there is no way to know whether the bird is cured or merely salty on the outside.
- Saltpeter out of rangePotassium nitrate was a common curing agent in kitchens of this period, and here it is given without any quantity at all. Nitrate and nitrite are now sold as measured cure blends precisely because the margin between an effective dose and a harmful one is narrow, and an unmeasured rub can land on either side of it.
- Cold smoke is not cookingA week hung "over a wood fire" is a cold or warm smoke: it dries and flavours the goose but never brings it to a temperature that kills pathogens. The bird is preserved by salt, nitrate and water loss alone, and every one of those variables is unquantified here.
- Clostridium botulinumThe interior of a dense, salted muscle held for weeks at ambient temperature is an environment in which C. botulinum can produce toxin, and correctly measured nitrate is what is relied on to suppress it in cured meats. That is why the missing quantities matter more than any other omission on this page.
- "A cool room" is not a numberThe finished goose is stored at whatever temperature the house larder happened to hold, which would have varied with season and weather. Modern curing specifies both temperature and relative humidity for the drying phase, and neither can be inferred from the text.
- "As soon as killed"The recipe assumes a bird plucked and dressed on the spot, warm, with no chilling and no intervening handling. A retail goose has a different bacterial history entirely, and the original timeline was never written with one in mind.
- If you want smoked gooseUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure weights as a percentage of meat weight, states the nitrite product by name, and specifies smoking and holding temperatures. The back and frame, as the original notes, do make a good stew or broth, and that part is unobjectionable.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the century, and this entry reads like a note from a charcutier rather than a cook: it assumes a bird killed on the premises, a smokehouse with a wood fire, and a cold larder in which things could hang for weeks. Smoked goose belongs to a Central and Eastern European tradition — Germany, Poland, Alsace and the Jewish kitchens of those regions, where goose supplied both fat and preserved meat for the winter. The technique of boning out the back, opening the bird flat and curing it as a slab is the same logic behind smoked goose breast, or ger ucherte G nsebrust: flat meat takes salt evenly and dries at a predictable rate. The instruction to sew the goose into muslin and then into thick cloth is a period method for the long hang, and the direction to use the discarded back for stew is the ordinary thrift of a kitchen that wasted nothing.