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Roast Gosling, Apple Sauce
Cut off the feet and neck of a fat six-pound gosling at the first joint. Singe, draw and truss, lay in a roasting pan, season with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Spread two tablespoons fat over the breast, pour two tablespoons water into the pan, set in the oven to roast for one and a half hours, turning it quite frequently and basting it with its own gravy once in a while. Remove, untruss, dress on a large dish, skim the fat from the gravy and pour the gravy over the bird. Decorate with a little watercress and send to the table with an apple sauce separately.
A short set of directions that assumes a cook who already knows how to handle poultry and a stove with no dial. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the roasting time, and what to do with the extraordinary amount of fat a goose gives up.
- What a gosling isA young goose, killed at a few months old and typically a smaller, lighter bird than a mature goose. Geese sold today are usually mature and heavier; a true gosling generally has to be ordered, and duck is the nearest common substitute (about two ducks for one goose).
- Oven heatThe original names none. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the bulk of the roasting; one modern approach is to begin hotter, around 425F for the first twenty minutes, to set and colour the skin before dropping to 350F.
- The time is too shortAn hour and a half will not bring a 6 lb bird with a dense fat layer to temperature. Reckon on 2 to 2 1/2 hours and go by a thermometer: 170-175F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Goose leg meat is tough and sinewy below that.
- Fat is the hingeA goose renders a great deal of fat, a cup or more from a bird this size. Prick the skin all over the breast and thighs before it goes in, set the bird on a rack rather than the bare pan, and ladle fat out two or three times during roasting. The two tablespoons of added fat the recipe calls for are unnecessary with any modern bird.
- "Basting with its own gravy"What collects in the pan is almost entirely fat, not gravy. Basting with it does nothing useful once the skin is rendering freely; the two tablespoons of water are there to keep the drippings from scorching, and should be topped up if the pan runs dry.
- Draw and trussDraw means remove the innards; birds now arrive drawn. Singeing takes care of pinfeathers left after plucking, and a cook's blowtorch or a gas flame still does it fastest. Trussing here means tying the legs and folding the wingtips under.
- The gravySkim thoroughly, as instructed, then thicken or reduce the small amount of true pan juices left. Poured unskimmed over the bird it is simply hot grease. Save the rendered fat for potatoes.
- YieldA 6 lb goose feeds four generously; the carcass carries far less meat for its weight than a chicken of the same size.
Roast goose with apple sauce is one of the fixed pairings of English and northern European cookery, the sharp fruit set against a very fatty bird, and it travelled into American books along with the Michaelmas and Christmas goose traditions. The distinction between gosling and goose mattered to a market cook in a way it no longer does: a bird taken young, sometimes called a green goose, was tender enough for straight roasting, while an older goose was more often braised or stewed. Filippini, who wrote out of the kitchens of Delmonico's, gives it the restaurant treatment of the period, dressed on a large dish with watercress and the sauce sent separately. The brief roasting time reflects an era when poultry was cooked to the eye rather than the thermometer.