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Braised Goose
Make a force meat with one pound of roasted chestnuts, peeled and mashed, one teaspoonful parsley, one tablespoonful of lemon juice and grated onion; salt and pepper. Mix the whole together with a tablespoonful of butter, stuff and sew up the opening. Place the goose in a braising pot with a tablespoonful of butter, and brown on all sides. Add a small onion, a bunch of parsley, a few outer leaves of celery, three cloves, a tablespoonful of salt, six peppercorns and a quart of water. When it boils cover closely and place in the oven. Cook for three hours. The gravy will be brown and thick. It may be reduced to a glaze by removing the goose, boiling rapidly for fifteen minutes. This is spread over the goose, and it is put in the oven for ten minutes. Garnish with celery tips and slices of oranges and serve with celery sauce and apple croquettes.
A straightforward pot-braise for a bird that is too fatty and too sinewy to roast well whole. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows to render off goose fat, which is where most modern attempts go wrong.
- Deal with the fat firstA 10-12 lb goose carries a great deal of subcutaneous fat, of which a pound or two will render out. Prick the skin all over, and after browning tip off the rendered fat before adding the quart of water, or the finished liquid will be grease rather than gravy. Save the fat; it keeps for months refrigerated.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bring the pot to a boil on the stovetop as directed, then hold it at 325F for the three hours — a bare simmer under the lid. Higher and the breast toughens before the legs give up.
- Size and yieldGeese of the period were commonly sold at something like 8-12 lb dressed, which would feed eight to ten. Much of that weight is frame and fat; count on roughly a pound of raw bird per person.
- The chestnutsOne pound of chestnuts in the shell yields somewhat less than a pound peeled, so buy about 1 1/4 lb in shell, or use vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts (about 1 lb) and warm them in the oven before mashing. The stuffing has no bread and no egg — it is meant to be dense and crumbly.
- Grated onionThe quantity is genuinely ambiguous: the tablespoon appears to cover the lemon juice, with the onion unmeasured. A small onion, grated on the coarse side of a box grater, suits the amount of chestnut.
- Stuffing a bird in advanceStuff immediately before cooking, not the night before, and check that the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F at the end of the three hours. Chestnut mash is dense and heats slowly.
- The glaze stepFifteen minutes of hard boiling will only reduce a quart of braising liquid so far. Skim the fat, then boil until it coats a spoon — this may take longer than the recipe says. Ten minutes back in the oven at 425F sets it and crisps the skin.
- Celery sauceNot given here; it appears as a separate entry in a number of books of this period — a white sauce built on milk with celery stewed soft in it and passed through a sieve. Braised celery or a sharp apple sauce serves the same purpose.
Braising was one nineteenth-century answer to goose, and a sensible one: the bird is muscular, unevenly fatted, and punishing to dry-roast. Chestnut stuffing for goose and turkey came into English and American cookbooks from French practice — American chestnuts were still abundant when this book was written, before the blight identified in New York in 1904 destroyed the species as a nut crop. The garnish of orange slices and celery tips, with apple croquettes on the side, is pure turn-of-the-century table dressing: rich meats were often expected to arrive with something acid or sweet alongside, and goose was frequently paired with apple.