A Christmas Goose is Cooked

According to the Urban Dictionary, the phrase "your goose is cooked" means you're done for, as in "You've been caught buying dope. Your goose is cooked!" (Their example, not mine). But last Sunday when my friend's husband, Pete, leaned into the living room to utter the phrase, it meant simply that the goose he'd prepared was, well, cooked.



The bird had been procured at John Dewar & Co. in Newton, MA (where specialty birds like squab, capon, pigeon, partridge, and even ostrich are also available). It was a twelve-pounder but relatively long and skinny-looking in comparison to the rounder, full-breasted turkey I'm used to seeing in a roasting pan. Pete said that when it came out of the package, it looked as though it had been slathered in Crisco. He'd stuffed it with apples and onions. The bird had required about two and a half hours to cook to a temperature of 165 degrees, and had released at least four cups of clear fat (visible in the photo to the right of the bird). Pete intended to save it for making French fries and so on.



I chose a piece of dark meat near the ribs and found it to be close to steak in consistency but with the milder flavor of poultry. Pete and Cynthia served a prune stuffing with apples and onions alongside. And for dessert, of course, there was an old-fashioned figgy pudding, tasting of molasses and well studded with figs, topped with hand-whipped cream and hard sauce made of butter and sugar. It was decorated with a sprig of holly.



And because a goose for Christmas (followed by pudding) is a tradition reflected in that most beloved of holiday tales, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, I leave you with an excerpt from that text and a brief scene of the Cratchit family meal, as revealed to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Present:

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone -- too nervous to bear witnesses -- to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough? Suppose it should break in turning out? Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose -- a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid? All sorts of horrors were supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered -- flushed, but smiling proudly -- with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage.