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Roast Stuffed Goose
Singe, cut head and feet off a medium-sized fat goose. Drain and thoroughly wipe the inside, remove gall bag from liver, then cut liver and heart in small square pieces. Finely chop one medium white onion with an ounce raw ham, place in frying pan with tablespoon melted lard and fry for three minutes. Add liver and heart, cook for two minutes, tossing once in a while, then transfer to a bowl.
Peel and core two medium apples, cut in small square pieces and add to bowl. Add also three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, two tablespoons milk, one egg, two skinned country sausages, a teaspoon chopped parsley, saltspoon ground thyme, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Mix all together till well amalgamated, then stuff goose with preparation. Tightly truss goose, place it in roasting tin, baste surface with a little melted lard and pour a half gill water in pan. Sprinkle over a heavy teaspoon salt, set in a moderate oven to roast for an hour and twenty-five minutes, being careful to turn once in a while, and frequently baste it. Remove, dress on a hot dish, untruss, decorate with a little watercress and serve with apple sauce separately.
A straightforward roast, but the stated cooking time belongs to a much smaller bird than most geese sold today, and the stuffing contains raw liver and sausage. Judge by temperature, not by the clock.
- Cook to temperature, not to 85 minutesAn hour and twenty-five minutes will not cook a modern 9–12 lb goose, and the stuffing holds raw liver and sausage meat. Roast until the thigh joint reads 175F and the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F — expect 2 to 3 hours depending on weight.
- Moderate oven350F. Some modern goose recipes start at 425F for 20 hen drop to 325-350F for the remainder.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of water is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: the thyme is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, the pepper about 3/4 teaspoon.
- Skip the lardA goose renders a great deal of its own fat. Basting with melted lard is unnecessary; prick the skin, pour off the accumulated fat two or three times during roasting, and keep it for potatoes.
- Country sausagesTwo links of plain fresh pork sausage, casings removed — roughly 4 to 6 oz of bulk sausage meat. Modern breakfast sausage is often sweetened or sage-heavy, which will fight the thyme.
- Singeing and the gall bagBirds now come plucked and drawn, so singeing means passing the skin briefly over a flame to remove pin feathers. The gall bag is the small green sac attached to the liver; if it breaks, the bitterness ruins whatever it touches, so discard any stained flesh.
- Stuff loosely, or not at allPacked stuffing slows the heat reaching the centre and lengthens the roast. Filling the cavity loosely helps; baking the mixture separately in a dish for 40 minutes is the reliable route and gives crisper edges.
- YieldA goose gives less meat per pound than it appears to. A 10 lb bird serves six, with the stuffing and apple sauce doing real work.
Goose was the festive bird of Europe long before turkey displaced it, tied in England to Michaelmas at the end of September and to Christmas thereafter, when the fat autumn birds came off the stubble fields. The stuffing here feadcrumbs, sausage and the bird's own liver and heart is a familiar continental treatment, the acidity of apple used to cut goose's richness, the same logic that puts apple sauce on the side. It reflects an era when nothing of the bird was wasted: the giblets went into the forcemeat, the rendered fat into the larder, and the carcass into stock.