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Roast Pig
(England.) Clean and singe a fat young pig. Stuff it with a forcemeat of bread, 2 pounds of pork and 2 pounds of veal, sage, thyme, lemon-peel, some parsley, onion, salt, pepper, and mace, mixed with the yolk of an egg. Sew up the slit and set the pig on its feet, basting it with butter, until done. ROAST GOOSE. (England, Michaelmas Day.) Singe and clean a fat goose, stuff it with the liver chopped fine, 1 cup or more of bread-crumbs, 2 ounces suet, lemon peel, nutmeg, and onion, sage, parsley, salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoonfuls of cream. Baste it with butter, dredge it with flour till brown, and serve with apple sauce. ROAST GOOSE (as cooked at Arles, Southern France.).
Singe, clean, and truss a young fat goose. Stuff it with 4 onions, parboiled, 4 ounces of bread soaked in milk, 3 ounces butter, a tablespoonful of parsley, a little nutmeg grated, and 4 ounces of chestnuts, all chopped fine and well mixed. Add salt and pepper. The chestnuts must be, of course, roasted, blanched, and cut up. Put the goose in a pan with 1 carrot, some celery, parsley, sweet marjoram, 1 onion, and a clove. Braise it, or cook, closely covered, in its own steam, for 2 hours. Take it out, strain, skim, and reduce the sauce and mix it with a cup of stewed and strained tomatoes. Heat it again and pour around the goose.
Three roasts run together under one heading, all of them written for a cook who already knew how long a bird sits at the fire. No temperatures, no weights for the pig or the geese, and one stuffing quantity that will not fit the animal it is meant for.
- No oven temperature is given anywhereThese were spit or open-hearth instructions transposed to a range. For a suckling pig, start at 450F for 20-30 minutes to set and blister the skin, then drop to 325F for the remainder. A goose wants 325-350F throughout, with the fat poured off two or three times.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockA 12-15 lb suckling pig runs roughly 2.5-3 hours total; a 10 lb goose about 2.5 hours. Take the pig to 160F in the shoulder, goose thigh to 175F, and any stuffing left inside the cavity to 165F.
- The forcemeat is out of scaleThe forcemeat may be out of scale — Four pounds of raw pork and veal plus bread is a great deal of stuffing for a young pig, and a dense mass that size is slow to heat through. Consider putting a portion in the cavity and baking the remainder in a dish alongside, basted with a little of the pan fat.
- "A fat young pig" means a suckling pig"A fat young pig" is usually read as a suckling pig — a few weeks old and somewhere in the region of 12-20 lb dressed. Order it from a butcher with a week's notice, specify head on and cavity split, and measure your oven before you commit: "set the pig on its feet" requires a roasting pan that fits diagonally in most home ovens.
- SingeingBoth animals arrive from a modern supplier already scalded and largely clean. Pass a kitchen torch over any remaining bristle or pinfeather stubs and wipe with a damp cloth; there is no need for the old business over a flame.
- Mace and lemon-peelMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself; ground mace from a jar is fine, about a quarter teaspoon for that volume of forcemeat. "Lemon-peel" means zest only, no pith.
- Suet and the dredgeTwo ounces of suet is about 60 g of shredded beef fat, sold frozen or from a butcher. Dredging the goose with flour partway through is a hearth-era browning trick; at 350F in a dry oven the skin browns perfectly well without it, and floury patches will taste raw.
- Goose fatA goose renders a pint or more. Ladle it out during roasting rather than letting the bird sit in it, strain it, and keep it refrigerated for potatoes it lasts months.
- The Arles goose is braised, not roasted"Cook, closely covered, in its own steam" means a lidded pot at 325F with the aromatics beneath the bird. The skin will not crisp; if you want it to, lift the lid for the last 20 minutes and raise the heat to 425F.
- ChestnutsFour ounces is about 115 g peeled weight. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts substitute directly for the roasted-and-blanched ones and save an hour of picking at inner skins.
- YieldA suckling pig serves 10-12; either goose serves 6-8, less than its size suggests, as the carcass is heavy and the breast shallow.
The heading (England.) is doing real work here: roast suckling pig and Michaelmas goose were both fixtures of the English calendar rather than everyday dinners, and the book files them as national specimens for a travelling reader. The goose belongs to Michaelmas, 29 September, when quarter-day rents fell due and tenants were widely said to have presented a fattened goose to the landlord along with the money; the birds were at their best after gleaning the stubble fields, which is why the association stuck. Sage, onion and apple sauce are the standard English accompaniments to a fatty bird, the acid cutting the grease. The Arles version shows another way with the bird entirely: a southern treatment that braises it slowly with chestnuts, tomato and aromatics rather than roasting it dry. Mace, nutmeg and lemon-peel in the forcemeat are holdovers from an older English spicing tradition that survived in stuffings and puddings long after it had left the rest of the meat course.