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Boiled Goose

A whole goose boiled and stuffed with bread crumbs, onions, sage, and butter, served with giblet sauce, pickles, and vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Goose

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dress and singe the goose.

  2. Place it in a deep dish and cover with boiling milk.

  3. Let it sit overnight.

  4. Wash off the milk from the goose.

Stuff and cook

  1. Place the goose in cold water on the stove.

  2. Bring the water to a boil.

  3. Remove the goose and wash it in warm water.

  4. Dry the goose with a cloth.

  5. Fill the goose with a mixture of bread crumbs, pepper, salt, butter, chopped onions, and sage, then close it up.

  6. Put the stuffed goose back in cold water.

  7. Boil gently until tender, about 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve the goose with giblet sauce, pickles, or acid jellies, and accompany with beets, turnips, and cauliflower.

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. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sage + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Goose
Supplies the meat and fat that make up the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread crumb stuffing.
Onions
Soften as they cook, adding moisture and mild sweetness to the stuffing.
Sage
Adds an aromatic herbal flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Boil gently until tender. Vigorous boiling toughens meat and can break the skin. A gentle simmer lets the goose cook through slowly and stay tender.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper, butter, onion, sauce, turnip, cauliflower):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper, butter, onion, sauce, turnip, cauliflower. 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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