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Goose Pie
(Strasburg.) Cut the meat from the bones of a roast goose, and put the bones, gravy, and stuffing in a quart of water with herbs and a carrot, celery, and an onion. When it has cooked 2 hours, strain it, and reduce it to a pint. Arrange a layer of boiled and mashed onions in a dish, along the sides and bottom, seasoned to taste, then a layer of meat, and so on, until full. Pour in the sauce, to which is added a spoonful of sherry and 1/2 cup of stewed tomatoes. Put a lid of paste on top, and bake 2 hours. Serve hot.
This is a second-day dish built on the carcass of a roast goose, and it stands or falls on the stock. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the original directions — the pastry vocabulary and the two-hour bake — need translating.
- The hinge: reduce the stock properlyA quart of water simmered with the bones, gravy and stuffing, then strained and boiled down to a pint, is the only sauce the pie gets. If it is thin, the filling will be watery under the crust. Reduce until it coats a spoon lightly, and skim the goose fat off before it goes in or the pie will be greasy.
- "A lid of paste"Paste means pastry. A plain shortcrust or a rough puff lid over the dish is right; the recipe wants a lid only, not a lined dish. Cut a vent so steam escapes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A pie of this kind belongs at 375-400F — hot enough to set and colour the pastry.
- Two hours is far too longEvery component is already cooked, so the bake exists only to brown the crust and heat the filling through. Forty to fifty minutes is enough; two hours will dry the goose to threads and overbrown the pastry.
- The mashed onion liningBoil the onions until soft, drain them thoroughly and mash dry — wet onion purée will slump and thin the sauce. Season it firmly with salt and pepper; goose leftovers are rich and need the contrast.
- "A spoonful of sherry"Read this as a tablespoon. A dry or medium sherry suits the stock better than a sweet one.
- Stewed tomatoesHalf a cup of canned chopped tomatoes, drained of most of their liquid, is a workable modern equivalent. Stewed tomatoes of the period were often cooked down to something fairly thick.
- YieldThe meat off one roast goose with a pint of sauce should roughly fill a 2-quart dish; the recipe gives no yield, but expect something in the region of six servings.
Goose pie is one of the oldest ways of dealing with a large bird that has already been to table once: the English kept raised goose pies as Christmas keeping-food for centuries, and the logic of this version — bones and leftover stuffing back into the pot, meat layered with onion, a pastry lid over the lot — is straight out of that thrifty tradition. The Strasburg attribution points to Alsace, a region long associated with goose because of the fattening trade that supplied its famous pâté. The naming is loose in the way such collections often are: a dish need only have been eaten somewhere to be labelled with the place. What dates it most clearly is the assumption that a household roasting a whole goose will have both the carcass and the stuffing left over, and a cook with two spare hours to make something of them.