No. 1947

Goose a la Thieblin—Roasted

Oie Rotie a la Thieblin

Pick out a fine goose, draw, singe and clean it thoroughly, then truss it for roasting. Boil fifty peeled chestnuts in some stock (No 194a) with a few shredded celery stalks, adding only sufficient of the moisture just to allow them to cook, and when done, drain. Put two pounds of pork forcemeat in a sautoir over a brisk fire, cook, stir occasionally and season with salt, mignonette, nutmeg, chopped parsley, a handful of bread-crumbs and two whole eggs, add the chestnuts and use this dressing to fill the insides of the goose, wrap it up in several sheets of buttered paper and roast it for two and a half hours, basting it over frequently. Twenty-five minutes before serving, unwrap the goose and return it to the spit in order to have it acquire a fine color, dress and serve with Zuchette sauce (No. 564). Garnish around the goose with croustades filled with gooseberries preparing them in the following way: Have two pounds of gooseberries, cut off the tops and stalks, blanch for two minutes, then drain. Cook in a saucepan a quarter of a pound of sugar to small crack, add the gooseberries, toss them gently, then cool off, stir in as much whipped cream as there are gooseberries, having it unsweetened and well drained; serve a sauce-boat of gravy (No. 404) at the same time.

← No. 1946 Goose a la Royer Duck & Goose No. 1948 Goose, German Style—Roasted →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a brigade with a turning spit, a stock pot always on, and a numbered sauce for every occasion. The dish translates cleanly to an oven, but three things need decisions: the stuffing, the sugar stage, and the cross-references you do not have.

The stuffing is the hingeTwo pounds of pork forcemeat is partly cooked in the pan before it goes into the bird, which is what makes the long wrapped roast work. Even so, a dense meat stuffing inside a goose is slow to heat; take it to 165F on a probe at the centre, or bake it alongside in a buttered dish and fill the cavity only with aromatics.
Bird and yieldThe recipe gives no weight; a goose of ordinary market size, say 9-11 lb dressed, plus the forcemeat would serve 8 to 10. Goose carries far more fat than turkey, so prick the skin over breast and thighs and set the bird on a rack over a deep pan, and expect to pour off a good deal of fat during cooking.
Oven, not spitRanhofer gives no temperature. Roasting at about 325F for the wrapped stage, allowing 2 to 2 1/2 hours in all for a bird of this size with stuffing, then unwrapping and raising the heat to about 425F for the last 20 to 25 minutes to colour the skin, follows the recipe's own timing. For the "several sheets of buttered paper," buttered parchment will do the job a loose foil tent does now.
Sautoir and mignonetteA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan; any wide heavy skillet works. Mignonette is coarsely cracked pepper, usually white, left coarse rather than ground fine.
ChestnutsFifty peeled chestnuts is roughly 1 1/2 lb in the shell, or about two 7-8 oz jars of vacuum-packed. Simmer them with the celery in only as much stock as they need to cook, as the recipe specifies, and stop while they still hold their shape; overcooked they turn to paste in the forcemeat.
"Small crack"An old sugar-boiling stage, roughly 275-280F on a thermometer, just below the hard-crack range. The hot syrup is used to glaze the blanched gooseberries, not to candy them solid, so work quickly and toss off the heat.
The gooseberry garnishBlanched, syrup-glazed gooseberries folded into an equal volume of unsweetened whipped cream is a gooseberry fool in all but name. Fresh gooseberries are seasonal and scarce in the US; frozen ones work, and the tops-and-stalks trimming is still worth doing by hand. Croustades are small fried bread or baked pastry cases, filled at the last moment or they weep.
The missing numbersNo. 564 (Zuchette sauce) and No. 404 (gravy) are elsewhere in The Epicurean. If you are not working from the whole book, a reduced brown sauce sharpened with a little of the roasting juices, plus a plain deglazed pan gravy in a separate boat, keeps the intended shape of the plate.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised as a numbered reference work: nearly every recipe leans on another by number, the way a kitchen's own notes would. Dishes named "à la" someone were the house's standard courtesy to patrons, performers and colleagues, and Thieblin is one of the many names Ranhofer attached to a preparation without explaining who they were. The construction itself is thoroughly French: chestnut-and-pork stuffing for goose belongs to the same tradition as the chestnut dressings still served with holiday birds in France, while the sweet-tart gooseberry garnish reflects the older European habit of pairing goose with sharp fruit—apple, quince, gooseberry—to cut its fat. The gooseberry is also a marker of the period. It was a common market fruit in nineteenth-century America and Britain, and only later fell out of general cultivation in the United States, in part because of restrictions on Ribes planting tied to white pine blister rust.