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Stewed Goose
Take two onions, peel and chop and put them in a stewpan with one tablespoonful of goose dripping or fat, and fry until soft and lightly colored. then dredge with flour, brown them and stir in one pint of clear broth. Cut up any cold remains of goose and put it into the sauce with a wineglassful of white wine and a tablespoonful of vinegar, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Put the lid on the pan and stew the contents for a quarter of an hour. Turn the stew out onto a hot dish and serve with any kind of vegetables on a separate dish.
A leftovers dish: cooked goose reheated in a quick brown onion gravy. The whole thing takes about 25 minutes once the goose is carved.
- The hingeThe goose is already cooked, so the fifteen-minute stew is only to heat it through and marry it with the sauce. Build and thicken the gravy first, then add the meat; longer simmering shreds it and dries it out.
- WineglassfulIn period usage roughly 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. A dry white — anything you would drink — is right; the tablespoon of vinegar is there to cut the fat, so keep both.
- Goose drippingThe fat spooned from the roasting pan and set aside, still sold in jars as goose fat. Duck fat, or plain butter, substitutes without complaint.
- Dredge with flourA light dusting over the softened onions, stirred and cooked a minute or two until it takes a little color. With only a tablespoon of fat in the pan, a tablespoon or so of flour is about as much as it will carry. That browning is what makes the sauce taste of something other than paste.
- Clear brothUnthickened stock, ideally made from the goose carcass; chicken or beef stock works. Use unsalted or low-sodium, since the goose and the seasoning will add salt of their own.
- Quantity and yieldA pint of broth and two onions will carry roughly a pound to a pound and a half of picked goose meat — two to three servings. Trim off the heavy fat and skin before cutting the meat up.
- ServingOscar's instruction to send the vegetables separately reflects service style, not necessity. Buttered cabbage, boiled potatoes or braised root vegetables suit the richness.
Stewed goose belongs to the large class of hotel and household recipes written not to cook a bird but to use one up. Roast goose was a festival dish — Michaelmas and Christmas in the English tradition — which meant that every kitchen faced the same problem the day after: a carcass with a good deal of dark, strongly flavored meat still on it. The answer here is the standard nineteenth-century reheating formula, browned onions and a flour-thickened broth sharpened with wine and vinegar, of a kind often applied to cold roast meats in the cookbooks of the period. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen, for all its reputation, ran on the same economies as any large establishment: nothing that had once been paid for went out with the scraps.