My goose is cooked

Andrew asks in comments to the previous post whether I might reveal the details of the goose recipe. As he was so good about doing the Stupid Internets Meme I foisted onto him, it is only fair to comply. And, by doing so in this forum, I can share the recipe with T6I's other readers as well. And that's a good thing, because people should cook more geese.

First, catch a goose. The rest follows below the fold.

All right, just kidding, you needn't catch your own goose, though I daresay it would add immeasurably to the holiday cheer to send the wee ones into the garden with instructions to chase down and capture the angry goose you've been fattening up. This year ours was just shy 5 kg, which is pretty much about as big as a goose gets, so far as I know. But then I am no goose-rancher so my knowledge of record goose-weights is minimal, and there might be much larger geese to be found, perhaps in Chernobyl. BTW, there is a really obscure (and really bad) translingual pun in this paragraph; a big round of admiring applause goes to the first reader to spot it. All the clues you need are right here in this post.

Anyway, I'll assume that you are neither a self-sufficient goose-hunter nor a bloodthirsty culinary maniac like Digby Anderson and thus have a man to do the plucking and gutting and beheading etc. So what you should be looking at is a naked, headless, eviscerated waterfowl on your work-table. You should wash it in cold water, pat it dry with paper towels and rub it well with salt and pepper, inside and out. Now set it aside for a moment, because you are going to make the stuffing. But first, we need to have a word about the fond.

The fond will be the basis for the sauce you will ladle over the goose later when the fun part comes. Essentially, you make the fond by cooking up the bits of the goose you won't be eating. (These are likely to be the neck as well as the heart and a few other nasty bits. If your goosemonger didn't give these to you in a convenient little sack, then you probably found them when you rammed your hand up the bird's fundament during the washing-and-drying discussed above.) Here's the problem: the spare goose bits you have on hand won't make a great deal of fond, and you are going to need a lot because so much of it will cook away, especially if your bird is as large as ours was (long cooking time at high temperature means little if any fond left in the pan). My advice to you is to cheat. You can buy decent goose fond in a jar, and use that. In fact, put 750 ml of it into a saucepan right now, and put the pan on to boil.

We do want at least a smaheen of authenticity, though, so we will add a bit of homemade fond to the mix. Throw the goose's neck and viscera into another saucepan, and add 400 ml cold water and 400 ml dry red wine (the wine may be the cheapest plonk you can find, so long as it is dry.) You want to bring this pan to the boil, then turn it down to the barest simmer; leave it like that until it is reduced to at most half its original volume.

Now, for the stuffing. Here's what you'll need:

• 500 g cooked and peeled chestnuts

• 3-4 sourish apples

• A couple of sprigs of mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris L.)

• A lemon; its skin must not have been sprayed or waxed

• A teacup's worth of raisins that you had the foresight to soak in cognac for at least 24 hours before starting this recipe

• A lump of butter

• 125 ml of that store-bought goose fond

• Salt, pepper

There are many recipes in whose preparation a painstaking precision about measurements is important. This recipe for stuffing is not one of them. You can soak any sort of raisinish or sultanoid things, dark or light, in the brandy, but dark might give a nice contrast as the apples and chestnuts are pretty light. You may crumble some of the mugwort into the stuffing mix if you like, but I don't. I just put the sprigs into the body-cavity of the goose before adding the stuffing. By the way, this might be a good time to preheat your oven to 200° (that's 200 degrees bolshevik, of course. 200 Fahrenheit will leave you with warmish goose sushi.)

Put the butter into a pan to melt over low heat. Shave the zest of the lemon into the butter. (There is a special tool for doing this. If you don't have one, just use a spud peeler or a very sharp and small-bladed knife, being careful to take only the yellow outer skin and not the bitter white pith beneath.)  Chop each chestnut in half and put them all into the pan along with some salt and pepper. Chop the dezested lemon in half and squeeze its juice into a bowl, then add water to the bowl. Peel, core and chop the apples, tossing the pieces into the lemon-water as you go (the acidulated water is an antioxidant and keeps the apple pieces from turning brown). When you're done, drain the apples well and put them in the pan with all the rest. Sauté the lot for a minute or two. Then add the raisins and the fond, turn the flame up high till the fond boils, then turn it back down low and simmer for a couple of minutes, stirring the while.

Lay the sprigs of mugwort inside the goose and start spooning in the stuffing. You want the body cavity to be full but not packed tight. Now close that gaping hole in the goose's bottom, either with small skewers or, if you have surgical training, by sewing it shut.

If you are smart, you will now truss your goose up with kitchen twine. Nothing too elaborate; you simply need to be able to lift the goose up to put it in the pan, lift it and flip it once, and then lift it out again at the end.

By now those 750 ml of storebought fond should be boiling merrily. Put the goose into a large roasting pan, breast-side down. Carefully pour the boiling fond all over it, then put the pan into the oven.

After an hour, flip the goose breast-side up. Take a sewer or fork and poke lots of little holes in the skin. This will help the fat to run out. (If you have never before cooked a goose you are going to be simply gobsmacked at the amount of fat in the pan when you're done.)

Every 15 or 20 minutes you should baste the goose. You can do this with a big spoon or ladle, but that can be messy and you're likely to burn your hand. It's a lot easier with a baster. But unless you cook geese frequently, you really don't need to buy a special goose-baster; a normal turkey-baster will do.

A goose this size needs about four hours in the oven.

When the four hours are up, take the goose out the pan, swaddle it in aluminium foil and put it back into the (now switched-off) oven on a platter to rest for ten or fifteen minutes. You will use this time to make the sauce.

Pour your homemade fond -- there should only be a bit more than a cup by now -- into a degreasing-glass, if you have one. If you don't, just try to spoon  off as much of the fat as you can. (You will invariably miss some, but that's all right; indeed, the sauce would have little flavour if it were fully fat-free.) If you have a turkey-baster, you can now try to get some of the fond back out of the roasting pan. Holding the baster as nearly perpendicularly as you can, lower it into the liquid in the pan until it hits bottom, then carefully raise it back up a millimetre or so. Suck up what you can and squirt it into a cup. Is it fond, or only fat? If the former, hooray; add it to the saucepan. Keep going until it's only fat left. You'll probably find little fond, though. So now you add some more of the storebought goose-fond to the saucepan until you have the amount of sauce you want.

Here's an optional bit: take the baster and hold its spout just under the surface of the fat. Suck up molten goose fat and fill it into a mug or small pot. You can strain out the little crackly bits if you like, or else leave them in. Cover and set in the refrigerator. Some other day, you can spread the goosefat onto warm bread and eat it. No, really.

Anyway, back to today's dinner. Bring the fond in the pan to the boil. Put a dram of Kirschwasser into a cup and then stir in some cornstarch. (How much starch you need will depend on how much sauce you are making; look on the box for instructions.) When the fond is boiling and the starch is well dissolved, pour the Kirschwasser/starch mix into the saucepan and start stirring like one possessed. Keep stirring until the sauce cooks up and thickens and at least some of the alcohol from the Kirschwasser is cooked away.

Take the goose out of the oven and defoil it. Chop it into appropriate pieces and arrange them on a platter with the stuffing in the middle. Carry it out to your guests and get busy.