No. 1950

Goose Stuffed with Chestnuts and with Sausages and Chestnuts—Roasted

Oie Rotie Farcie aux Marrons et aux Saucisses et Marrons

Select a fine goose; singe and reserve the fat and giblets, then wipe out the insides and fill it, also the breast with a dressing prepared as follows: Take one pound of chopped veal, and two pounds of chopped fat pork, only mixing them together afterward, and season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and allspice; add two gills of stock (No. 149a) or water, and pound the whole together; then mix in sixty chestnuts that have been roasted in the oven and freed of skins. Truss the goose and lay it in a roasting-pan with its own fat and half a pint of hot water, sprinkle fine salt over it, and cover with a buttered paper; then place it in the oven to cook for three hours, being careful to baste it occasionally; it should be well done; salt over, untruss, and dress on a dish; skim the fat from the surface of its liquid, pour in a little gravy (No. 404), boil, and then strain through a sieve. Throw a little of this over the goose and serve the remainder separately.

With Sausages and Chestnuts.—Prepare and cook the goose exactly the same only omit putting the chestnuts in the dressing; but braise them and use them for garnishing both sides of the goose and arrange small broiled Chipolata sausages (No. 754) on the ends.

← No. 1949 Geese Giblets with Turnips Duck & Goose No. 1951 Gosling a la Soyer →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a kitchen with a butcher's counter, a goose that arrives whole and undrawn, and a cook who already knows his numbered stocks. The dish itself is straightforward; almost everything that needs translating is a unit, a temperature, or a cross-reference.

The hinge: cook the forcemeat to temperatureThree pounds of raw veal and pork packed into a bird cavity heats slowly and unevenly. Check the centre of the dressing with a thermometer and take it to 165F; if the goose is done before the stuffing is, the safer course is to bake the surplus forcemeat separately in a buttered dish.
Gills and pintsTwo gills of stock is one cup. Half a pint of hot water in the pan is one cup — enough to keep the drippings from scorching, not enough to steam the bird.
Oven heatNo temperature is given, and no weight for the bird. The three hours stated suits a moderate oven, about 325-350F; adjust to the goose you actually have.
ChestnutsSixty chestnuts is roughly 1 1/2 lb in the shell, or a little over a pound peeled. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts work and skip the worst of the labour, though they are softer and will break up if pounded with the forcemeat.
"Chopped" means groundChopped veal and fat pork here is what we would buy as coarse ground veal and ground pork fat or fatback. Ranhofer does direct that each be chopped separately and combined afterward, presumably to keep the fat from smearing and the mixture from turning pasty.
Buttered paperUse buttered parchment laid directly on the breast, not foil, which traps steam and defeats the browning. Remove it for the last half hour.
The numbered referencesNo. 149a is one of Ranhofer's stocks and No. 404 his gravy; a good reduced brown stock stands in for both. Chipolata (No. 754) are small, thin fresh pork sausages.
The goose fatSkim and keep it. A roasting goose will give up several cups of clear fat, worth more than the pan gravy for potatoes and confit.
YieldA goose of this size with three pounds of forcemeat serves eight generously — the stuffing is a substantial dish in its own right.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of a great restaurant's repertoire, and its goose chapter is thoroughly French in outlook: oie rôtie farcie aux marrons was standard festive cookery in Paris. The two variations on one page look like a restaurant habit more than a domestic one — the same bird, the same roasting, but chestnuts either bound into the forcemeat or braised whole and banked around the dish with chipolata sausages, which gives a kitchen two menu items from one procedure. The chestnut-and-goose pairing is generally explained by season: chestnuts fall in October and November, and geese are at their best fattened in the same weeks. The forcemeat itself, veal lightened with a great deal of pork fat and pounded smooth with stock, is close to the nineteenth-century godiveau that underlies dozens of entries in this book, though godiveau is classically made with kidney suet.