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Roast Goose
Stuff and roast in the same manner as ducks. Many cooks cover poultry with a paste of flour and water while baking, removing it before it is served.
Two sentences of instruction assume you have already read the duck entry and know how a roasting bird behaves. Here is what the original leaves out.
- The hinge: render the fatA goose carries far more subcutaneous fat than a duck of the same weight. Prick the skin all over through the fat but not into the meat, start at 425F for 30 minutes, then drop to 325F for the remainder, pouring off the accumulated fat every 40 minutes or so. Fat left in the pan smokes and stews the bird's underside.
- Weight and timingA market goose runs 10-12 lb and feeds 6-8 people, less generously than the weight suggests because the frame is large and the breast comparatively small. Reckon roughly 20 minutes per pound at the temperatures above, and go by the thermometer rather than the clock.
- Doneness165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. If the cavity is stuffed, the stuffing must also reach 165F, which is why many cooks now bake the dressing in a separate dish and fill the bird only with onion, apple and herbs.
- "Stuff and roast in the same manner as ducks"The duck stuffings in books of this period are usually sage and onion with bread, or apple. Any of these suit goose; the fruit and allium are there to cut the richness, not merely to fill space.
- The flour-and-water pasteEssentially the same idea as the sacrificial flour-and-water crust older books call a huff paste: rolled thin and laid over breast and legs to keep them from scorching during a long roast in an unregulated fire. It is discarded, not eaten. Foil does the same work with less trouble, and on goose the paste is largely unnecessary since the fat cap protects the breast.
- Resting and carvingRest the bird 20-30 minutes under a loose tent before carving. Goose leg meat is dense and dark and benefits from being carved off the bone entirely rather than served as a joint.
- Keep the fatStrained and refrigerated, rendered goose fat keeps for months and is the best available medium for roast potatoes. The recipe's silence on the subject reflects a kitchen where nothing needed to be told to save drippings.
Goose was the festival bird of Britain long before turkey displaced it, eaten at Michaelmas in late September when the birds had fattened on stubble fields, and again at Christmas; in much of North America, turkey was already the customary festival bird well before the period described. The terseness here is characteristic of the community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, among them The Home Cook Book: contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew how to dress and truss a bird, so the entry does no more than point back to the duck instructions and pass along one useful trick. The flour-and-water paste it mentions was standard insurance in a coal or wood range, where oven heat could not be dialled down and the cook's only defence against a scorched breast was a physical shield. Goose declined in North American kitchens as urban households lost access to farmyard poultry and as commercial turkey production expanded, and by the mid-twentieth century it had become a deliberate throwback rather than an ordinary Sunday dinner.