Geese in Jane Austen

NotSpaghetti

A green goose is a spring one - young, "green" geese are more delicate and tender. They would have fed on fresh spring grass and greens, rather than being fattened up on grain or harvest leftovers later in the year. I think Christmas Geese were "Stubble Geese".

I don't remember Mansfield Park at all but they were considered a seasonal luxury.

Thank you for the explanation of a green goose NotSpaghetti. I had always thought it referred to the colour of the goose.

I can remember having my chest rubbed with goose grease as a very young child, I think a bit of cloth went on afterwards to try to stop it spreading but I can’t remember a smell from it at all and I think I would have. Heaven knows where the goose grease came from, in the middle of London we certainly didn’t have any but obviously somebody did. I can also remember hot poultices being put on my neck for swollen glands and I hated that too. Makes you realise how lucky we are to have antibiotics now.

Rabbit is very out of fashion now I think. My Dad practically was reared on it, & we did breed rabbits for meat when I was a little girl (they were white with pink eyes & I was a bit traumatised). You could get it from most butchers'. I've never seen rabbit for sale in our local butchers.

I like eating goose, perhaps for the wrong reasons. I am the only one in the family who likes it, so I rarely get to eat it. The wrong reasons? When I lived in St. Albans there was a large gaggle of geese that lived on the common. Maybe 50 of them? They were super aggressive and I got chased by about a dozen of them on the one and only time I walked on the common. When I eat goose it crosses my mind that in a small way, I am getting my own back. They are greasy to eat and as several people have said, there is a lot of fat for relatively little meat.

valdali

Rabbit is very out of fashion now I think. My Dad practically was reared on it, & we did breed rabbits for meat when I was a little girl (they were white with pink eyes & I was a bit traumatised). You could get it from most butchers'. I've never seen rabbit for sale in our local butchers.

My mother-in-law used to make rabbit stew many years ago. The rabbits were sold in a butchers in Leeds market. At one time, a whole aisle was devoted to butchers. Now there are only 2 butchers left in the market and they don't sell anything as at all unusual.

DH was a farm manager so in the seventies I was able to indulge my earth mother culinary ambitions by teaching myself to cook dishes like stuffed pigeon, rabbit stew, pheasant casserole and jugged hare thanks to Mrs Beaton and Elizabeth David. I was in my element and rarely out of the kitchen😂
DH would be only too happy to help local farmers out with machinery repairs if it meant a well stocked freezer!
Those were the days!! 😋

I have seen them on sale in Aldi at Christmas a few years ago, frozen and fresh. I know my previous neighbour had two one year but I think they had them from a butcher.

I remember joining the great panic buying frenzy one Christmas as tins of goose fat sold out after Delia and Nigella recommended it for roasting potatoes.

I think rabbit was the last meat I cooked (in student halls so a long time ago) other than a turkey for others at Christmas.

I was already a vegetarian by the time I cooked the rabbit and far too many people (who would later eat it) commented on how "gross" it was preparing it!

I wish people who ate meat would at least be able to prepare it themselves!

We always have goose when we can. I cook it upside down on a rack to start with and pour off the fat before turning it over to brown. The fat is wonderful for cooking, including roast potatoes. We normally freeze some of it. I find turkey boring.

We have goose for Christmas every year - our neighbours would take the left over clarified fat - for what (other then roast potatoes) I know not - I have always wanted to cook ‘colonial goose’ using the Good Housekeeping recipe - maybe one day 👍☘️

MaizieD

P.S I’ve read that swan is dry and fishy tasting. The Royals are welcome to it😆

... can't think of anything worse on a dinner plate - dry meat tasting like fish... ugh!

We use goose fat to sauté anything that doesn't need to start with olive oil. So sofrito and other starter casserole ingredients, meat for a chicken, steak or game pie, fried bread with eggs and bacon, pastry for a pork pies (though that was quite tricky to handle).
Goose fat has almost half the saturated fat of butter.

Don’t forget Nottingham’s annual Goose Fair, which has been in existence since 1284. Thousands of geese were driven from the counties to the east to be sold, as a trade event, for eating at the traditional Michaelmas feast to celebrate the end of harvest. Their feet were coated in tar and sand to prepare them for the long walk. It has only ever been cancelled for the Great Plague, the two WW’s and Covid.

Dh recalled his mum plucking and gutting a goose on her parents’ smallholding, when he was a young boy. I’ve never had goose, I don’t think, my mum didn’t like it.

A friend of mine helped clear her Granny’s farmhouse and they found umpteen brown paper bags full of bits of string and 19lb of goose fat in those earthenware jars you used to get!

I’ve never been tempted to buy or cook one, given what my mother told me about managing to acquire one for Christmas dinner sometime IIRC after the war, when rationing was still going on. She said there was so much fat on it, there was barely enough actual meat to go round - they were very disappointed.
I do really like a crispy half duck, though, served with cucumber, spring onions and hoi sin sauce in Chinese pancakes.