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Roast Goose with Potato Stuffing

Roast goose stuffed with potatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with watercress, cranberries, potato apples, and apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and potato work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Goose with Potato Stuffing

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the goose

  1. Singe, remove pin feathers, wash, and scrub the goose in hot soapy water.

  2. Draw the goose by removing the inside contents, then wash in cold water and wipe dry.

  3. Stuff the goose, truss it, and sprinkle with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  4. Lay the strips of fat salt pork over the breast.

Roast and baste

  1. Place the goose on a rack in a dripping pan and bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for two hours.

  2. Baste every fifteen minutes with the fat in the pan.

  3. Remove the pork during the last half-hour of cooking.

Serve

  1. Transfer the goose to a platter, cut the string, and remove the string and skewers.

  2. Garnish with watercress and cranberries, and place potato apples between pieces of watercress.

  3. Serve with apple sauce.

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. Watercress + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pork + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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 and flavours the bird as it roasts.
Fat salt pork
Lays over the breast to add fat that bastes the lean meat during roasting.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the skin and meat and helps draw out moisture for a crisper surface.

The step that matters

Baste every fifteen minutes. Spooning rendered fat over the bird keeps the surface moist and helps the skin brown and crisp. Letting the pan dry out can scorch the fat and leave the skin tough.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, pork, watercress, potato, sauce. 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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