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Stuffing for Goose
Roast fifty chestnuts, using care not to let them burn; remove both the inner and outer peels, and chop them fine. Chop the goose's liver, put it in a saucepan with one-half tablespoonful each of chopped parsley; shallots, chives and a little garlic, and about two ounces of butter; fry them for a few minutes, then put in the chopped chestnuts with one pound of sausage-meat, and fry the whole for fifteen minutes longer. The stuffing is then ready for the goose.
A rich, meaty forcemeat of the French school, given in Oscar's usual shorthand — no yield, no oven, and no word on how it finishes cooking. A few notes fill the gaps.
- Fifty chestnutsThat is roughly 1 to 1.25 lb in the shell, yielding about 12 oz peeled. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute; use about 12 oz and skip the roasting and peeling.
- PeelingThe hinge of the whole recipe. Score each nut with an X, roast at about 425F for 15-20 minutes, and peel while still hot: the papery inner pellicle tightens and turns bitter as the nuts cool and is much harder to get off cleanly once cold. The temperature is a modern suggestion; the recipe gives none.
- Shallots, chives, garlicHalf a tablespoon each of parsley, shallot and chive, plus "a little" garlic, meaning a clove at most. The mixture is deliberately restrained; this is a garnish of aromatics, not a herb stuffing.
- Sausage-meatIn 1896 this meant bulk pork sausage, coarsely ground, seasoned mainly with salt, pepper and sage. Plain bulk breakfast sausage is the closest thing on a modern counter; avoid anything with maple or fennel.
- Goose liverFrozen geese often come with a giblet packet. If yours does not, roughly an equal weight of chicken liver works; a goose liver of this sort tends to run around 3 to 4 oz.
- The fifteen-minute fryThis part-cooks the sausage but does not finish it. Do not treat the mixture as ready to eat when it leaves the pan.
- Cooking it in the birdStuffing packed inside a goose must reach 165F at its center, checked with a thermometer, which in a large bird often means the breast overcooks first. Baking the stuffing in a separate dish, moistened with a little stock and given 40-45 minutes at 350F, is the safer and better-tasting course.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of stuffing, enough for a 10-12 lb goose with a little over.
- FatGoose and sausage together throw a great deal of fat. Two ounces of butter is generous for the initial fry; an ounce is plenty, and the rendered sausage fat will carry the rest.
Chestnut-and-sausage stuffing for goose is a French farmhouse formula that traveled into grand American hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth century, and Oscar Tschirky — the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, not in fact its chef — collected it in the same spirit as the rest of this book: as the plain working shorthand of professionals who already knew what they were doing. Roast goose was still a standard holiday bird in New York in 1896, closer to the English and German tables that had shaped the city's eating than to the turkey that would later crowd it out. The chestnut belongs to the dish for reasons of season as much as flavor; the American chestnut was then abundant and cheap in autumn markets, before the blight identified in New York in 1904 killed the mature trees in the billions — the species survives as root-sprouting understory growth — and left the country dependent on European and Asian imports. A recipe calling casually for fifty chestnuts reads differently now than it did when it was written.