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Marbled Goose
Take a well pickled beef tongue, wash it clean and boil it until tender. Skin it and allow to cool; cut a deep slit down the center and rub in two tablespoonfuls of the following: stone and chop fine twelve olives, mix with two tablespoonfuls of mace, cloves, nutmeg, salt and one teaspoon half full of cayenne. Have ready a cleaned fowl and goose. Bone them both. If cut down the middle of the back the bones are readily removed with sharp pointed knife. Lay the tongue inside the raw fowl, rub the outside of the latter well with the seasoning. Put this inside the goose with the remainder of the seasoning and bind it securely about the fowl, using tapes and skewers to secure it in a natural shape. Put it in an earthen jar, just large enough to hold it, add one small onion, two tart apples, a stalk of celery, a bunch of parsley, a teaspoonful of salt, one small red pepper pod and a quart of water. Place in a cool oven and bake six hours. Remove from the jar, pour out all the liquid, wash the jar, replace the goose and set aside. When the liquid is cold skim off all the fat, add to it a pound of butter and two pounds of clean lard. Melt all together and pour over the goose. It must be completely covered if required to be kept some time. Cover the top of jar with brown paper and press on the lid. Thus it will keep in a perfect condition for six months, if placed in a cool airy situation. When wanted for use, place jar in pan of warm water to melt the fat, remove the goose and cut in thin slices. It has a very pretty marbled appearance; garnish with olives and bits of aspic. This is an excellent standby.
This is a boned bird-within-a-bird, braised slowly and then sealed under fat as a keeping meat. The cooking is sound old kitchen work; the storage instruction at the end is what makes the recipe unusable today, and it cannot be patched with a temperature or a timing.
- Why it fails: six months under fat in a cool roomSealing cooked poultry under butter and lard creates an oxygen-free interior at room temperature, which is the exact condition Clostridium botulinum requires to produce toxin. The 1900 household had a cold cellar and a fast turnover of a large joint; a modern pantry has neither, and there is no visible or olfactory sign of spoilage in a fat-sealed potted meat. Nothing in the recipe acidifies, salts or heats the mass enough to control it.
- Why it fails: the reheating stepStanding the jar in warm water to melt the fat, then slicing the bird cold, brings the meat up through the temperature range where any organism present has been multiplying and does not destroy pre-formed toxin. The dish is eaten cold from the jar, so the cooking done six months earlier is the only heat it ever gets.
- Why it fails: the cure is undefinedThe whole preservation scheme leans on the tongue being "well pickled" and on an unspecified quantity of salt in the seasoning. No brine strength, no curing time and no holding temperature are given, so there is no way to know whether the salt level is anywhere near preservative. If you want a galantine or a confit, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated refrigeration.
- A cool ovenIn books of this period 'cool' and 'slow' ovens are loosely reckoned at somewhere between about 200 and 300F, and the terms were not standardised. With a quart of water in a covered earthen jar the bird is effectively steam-braised rather than roasted, which is why six hours does not dry it out.
- The earthen jarA glazed earthenware crock with a lid, which the recipe says should be just large enough to hold the bird; a close fit also means less fat is needed to cover it. Comparable vessels were used for potted meats and for confit.
- The seasoning is ambiguous"Two tablespoonfuls of mace, cloves, nutmeg, salt" almost certainly means two tablespoons of the combined mixture, not two of each; two tablespoons of ground cloves alone would be inedible. The original does not say, and the ambiguity is one more reason to work from a modern formula.
- Boning down the backThe technique described is still standard for galantine: cut along the spine, work the knife against the carcass, and free the frame while leaving the skin intact. Wing and drumstick bones are often left in for shape. Tapes are flat cotton kitchen tape.
- YieldA goose stuffed with a whole fowl and a tongue makes a large assembly, likely well over ten pounds; the recipe treats it as something to be sliced thin and drawn on over time rather than served as a single course.
Birds boned and packed one inside another are an old European show dish, best known through the French rôti sans pareil described by Grimod de La Reynière early in the nineteenth century, and surviving today in the turducken; here the appeal is the cross-section, where the layers of dark goose, pale fowl and pink tongue read as a pattern when the joint is cut cold -- the recipe's own "very pretty marbled appearance", which is presumably the source of the name. Setting such a thing under a seal of butter and lard belongs to the older tradition of potted meats, the same logic as French confit and English potted beef, in which fat excludes air and a cold cellar does the rest. Calling it "an excellent standby" suggests a kitchen without refrigeration, in which a cool larder and a large cooked joint could stand in for frequent shopping; how common such keeping joints were in practice is harder to establish.