Welcome to No Cartouche.
For anyone stumbling across this newsletter for the first time, a legitimate thought might be, really? Another recipe blog is that what the world really needs? And of course, the answer is no. So why, you might rightly ask, therefore, is that what I am putting out into the world?
Well, for a start, this is not strictly a recipe blog. It is a newsletter. A newsletter, that is, that allows me to collate my thoughts on matters regarding food. Or sustenance. Or my own greed. Depending on how you see it. And rather than recipes, what I hope to write about, ponder upon, argue with myself about, is ingredients, techniques, cookbooks, people, and yes, occasionally, recipes.
Without barricading myself in a fort of my own construct, but to give you an idea of where this might go from here, I plan to share my feelings and considerations and confusions on Goose this week. Next week, I hope to share my reflections on Fried Bread, and in the weeks after that, I have thoughts on Molly Keane, Oxtail, the perfect pantry, and the joy of Tudor style meat pies, that I hope to share with my small but perfectly formed audience.
Each week there will be a free newsletter that goes out on a Saturday morning. There will also be an accompanying set of recipes derived from what I’ve been reflecting on that week. In order to receive the recipes alongside the newsletter, you’ll have to be a paying subscriber, an honour I vouch to be worth much more than the monetary value attributed to it.
As for me? Well, I tend to prefer to stand just off stage, prompting from the wings so to speak. I have worked as a chef for many years, I have consulted on numerous restaurant openings, I have developed recipes and written columns in other peoples voices for some of our best-known newspapers, and I have written books about Sandwiches and Picnics with a very dear friend of mine. One day, much like Sia and Kanye West, I may switch from behind the mic to being out in front, but much more likely, just like the original shadow man, Bernie Taupin, I will slice and dice and tap away at laptop keys from the safety of my suburban garden shed. I like it out here.
All of which brings me onto Goose. A few weeks ago, in a rare departure from my suburban solace, I was up in town being festive with one of my long time employers. Talk turned to Christmas, and then to Turkey, and before long we ended up at Goose. Specifically at the why and how of cooking the thing, and the when and why of its demise as a legitimate choice of sustenance on the British Christmas table. There will of course be foodies and ponces and the plummy of tongue who bray that, for them, it is the only choice at this time of year, but I’m here as a reality check, it is not. Not for the majority of us, and I’d like to know why.
For a chef I once had the pleasure of working for, (a man, this is, who has been proven frustratingly correct when he decreed in a reference he once gave for me that I was “reliable, but capable of nothing groundbreaking in the kitchen”) we cooked a ceremonial roast goose for a Christmas feature in The Independent. My memory of the task was that it was a very fatty enterprise, the goose being in possession of quite a handsome quantity of fat all over its being, but other than that it was a relative breeze to cook. We kept the gifted fat for frying the rest of the Christmas accoutrements, which for the home cook would mean saving a king's ransom in jars of expensive duck and goose fat from Waitrose.
So what happened? Well, as noted by Polly Russell in the FT, there was once a time, say around the mid-Victorian era, that almost a million Geese a year were sold for food in London alone. At the same time, not even 100,000 Turkeys were consumed. By comparison, an estimated 9 million Turkeys will be sold and consumed this year, with only a couple of hundred thousand Geese being reared for the Christmas table. It is a well-worn path that winds from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to many of our modern Christmas traditions, and whilst I’m not here to discuss the validity of each, or any, of them, it is worth noting that it is a large Turkey that scrooge buys for the Cratchits as a replacement for the little Goose that they were due to cook and consume.
If the subtext of Scrooge’s gift of a prize Turkey is that this is the premium choice for a special occasion, things couldn’t be further from the truth nowadays. A butcher I know of in Essex has a very good offering of the full range of festive birds. By way of comparison, his goose is double the price of the same weight of duck. It is also 30% more than the turkey and 40% more than the chicken. So, much like Oysters, cheap street food in Victorian times, Goose has suffered from a stark price rise at the same time as our palettes have become untrained and flabby by years of being led towards processed blandness by supermarkets and fast-food chains.
The reality is that Geese are tough to breed. They lay eggs once a year and demand complete free-range. Turkeys, on the other hand, will merrily lay eggs all year round and can be reared in close quarters with thousands of their kin. So, as a meat to supply a booming global populace, you can see why commercial farmers would lean towards the one over the other.
Writing this, I find myself caught between two polar ideological positions. On the one hand, I believe that culinary traditions and techniques are relevant and exciting, and almost always worth preserving. On the other, though, why cherish and cling to a specific type of meat at all in the current context. For many of us, a high-welfare Turkey is what we love to hate or hate to love on Christmas Day, and for those that would rather not, a well-reared local chicken or duck is going to be cheaper, and more delicious, than fighting for a goose. All of them lend themselves better to leftovers, that is for sure. Cold Goose with its insipid slick of fat and light gamey flavour, is not much to write home about the day after the event. Hell, we could do worse than ignoring beef for the entire year, and turning that into our once a year ceremonial meat, the planet would certainly thank us, and cold roast beef ticks a lot of boxes for me. And for those of you in the back clamouring to point out the cast-iron case for defending our fragile climate, there is, of course, much to be said for a pilaf stuffed pumpkin, a lavish nut roast, or a gold-standard vegetarian pie, instead of any of these meaty options. Where’s the modern-day Dickens to write that into our future folklore?
In certain parts of China and Hong Kong, the goose is a rare and special treat, often treated in the same way a duck might be, and I would certainly be there for that. In Germany and especially the Alsace, the goose is elevated to near mythical status with stuffings and adornments such as apples, sweet chestnuts, prunes, mugwort and marjoram, even bratwurst is pressed into service as a delectable stuffing. In neither place is it an especially festive bird. The suburban Surrey of my childhood was devoid of much culinary fanfare. Turkey was served dry on Christmas day, in sandwiches on boxing day, and then as a casserole with the addition of cream of mushroom soup on the day after that. It is still what we eat today. It is much more succulent nowadays on Christmas day, still gets used in sandwiches for a big walk on boxing day, and normally becomes a livening curry on the day after that. Goose might have been in your family heritage, and if so, good on you, keep that memory alive, and perhaps let us all know how you best make use of the excess fat and the unpalatable cold leftovers, but for those of us that don’t have Goose in our cultural memory, I think we can rest easy with letting it go.
In the spirit of supporting my own narrative, recipes for a very special leftover turkey curry, the turkey casserole of old, and the ceremonial stuffed squash will follow on Monday. Until then, eat well and be merry.
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