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Roast Goose

Roast goose stuffed with bread crumbs, butter, sage, pepper, salt, onion, and optional giblets, baked and served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Stuff the goose with a mixture of bread crumbs, butter, sage, black pepper, salt, and chopped onion, but do not overstuff.

  3. Stitch the openings firmly to keep the flavor in and fat out.

Roast

  1. Place the goose in a baking pan with a little water.

  2. Baste frequently with saltwater (and vinegar if desired) and turn often for even browning.

  3. Bake for two hours or more until done.

  4. Remove the goose from the pan and pour off the fat.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. To the remaining brown gravy, add the chopped giblets that have been stewed until tender, along with the water they were boiled in.

  2. Thicken the gravy with a mixture of flour and butter, bring to a boil, and serve.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sage + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 rendered fat that bastes the bird and forms the gravy.
Bread crumbs
Soak up butter and meat juices in the stuffing, keeping it moist and tender inside the bird.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries sage and pepper flavor through the stuffing and gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with butter, giving it body.
Onion
Adds savory aromatic flavor to the stuffing as it cooks.

The step that matters

Pouring off the fat before making the gravy. Goose releases a lot of fat during roasting. Leaving too much in the pan makes the gravy greasy and thin, so the fat should be removed before thickening with flour and butter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, sage, pepper, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sage, pepper, flour. 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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