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Roast Goose

Roast Goose is a dish prepared by roasting a goose with onion, sage, mashed potato dressing, and basting with its own fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Goose

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the goose

  1. Prepare the goose like a turkey.

Make the dressing

  1. Add the finely chopped onion and a pinch of sage to the dressing made of mashed potatoes.

Roast and baste

  1. Skim excess fat from the gravy in the pan before dredging and browning the goose.

  2. Finish roasting the goose and make gravy as you would for turkey.

  3. Use only the goose's own fat for basting.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Sage + potatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together386 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Goose
Provides the main meat, and its own rendered fat keeps the bird moist and crisps the skin.
Mashed potatoes
Form the base of the dressing, giving it moisture, body and a soft texture.
Onion
Softens as it cooks, adding savoury sweetness and aroma to the dressing.

The step that matters

Skim excess fat from the gravy in the pan before browning the goose. Goose carries a lot of fat. Leaving excess fat in the pan can make the gravy greasy and cause it to spatter or smoke at high browning heat, so removing it first keeps the gravy clean-tasting.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, potato, pepper):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, potato, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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