In Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Scrooge's arrival with the prize Christmas turkey overjoys Tiny Tim and his family.
But the turkey was an extravagance, for the traditional British Christmas dish was the goose, which is exactly what the Cratchits were enjoying prior to Scrooge's largess. Goose is still a traditional British Christmas dish, and is savored at other times as well, but it has never been upstaged by turkey in the north of England. In Wales, goose is the bird of choice. Dylan Thomas' poem tells us "...that gobbling faces,/their cheeks bulged with goose, would press/ against the tinseled windows, the whole length/of the white echoing street."
A traditional British dinner can be roast goose or turkey, accompanied with chestnuts and apples, or you could make a roast goose pie, in which one fully boned goose is carefully stuffed inside another and baked in a raised pie-crust.
There are many ways to cook a goose. Elizabeth David, the noted English author, advises cooking it stuffed with a side dish of chestnuts and apples, her reason being if you are going to have your goose cold, the stuffing will have too much goose fat in it to be appealing. She instructs: "Put the goose on a rack in the largest baking tin that will fit into the oven (a lot of fat runs out of the bird while cooking). Cover an 8 lb. drawn and dressed goose with oiled paper or foil, and bake it for 2 ½ to 3 hours. During the final half hour, turn the heat every low and remove the paper so that the skin turns golden." One presumes the oven is set at 350 degrees.
John Hadamuscin, in his cookbook The Holidays, creates a mouth-watering menu of roasted goose with sage-and-scallion dressing. This is accompanied by the inevitable roasted chestnuts, applesauce, sauteed red cabbage, and of course, Christmas pudding, which most closely resembles our fruitcake. Trifle is another Christmas dessert.
Hadamuscin's stuffing contains scallions and celery, diced apples, breadcrumbs, sage, thyme, and parsley, and is moistened with chicken stock and two lightly beaten eggs. He advises pricking the goose with a fork to allow the excess fat to escape during roasting and cooking it at 450 degrees for the first 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees for the rest of the roasting period (20 minutes per pound, unstuffed weight).
Authentic English dish
But if you can't procure a goose, or want to have another kind of authentic English feast, circa 1800, we offer another traditional English Christmas dish: spiced beef. In "An Omelette and a Glass of Wine," Elizabeth David tells us how it was made:
In former times huge rounds of beef weighing upwards of 20 lbs. were required to lie in pickle for three to four weeks. Today, a modest 5 to 12 lb. piece will be ready for cooking after 10-14 days.
Not only is the meat thoroughly cooked, it is literally preserved, as the recipe calls for light brown sugar, saltpeter, coarse kitchen salt, black peppercorns, and juniper and allspice berries. Because there was no real refrigeration then, pickling helped preserve the meat so, once
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