What to Serve With Wild Goose

Wild goose has the worst reputation of any bird a hunter brings home, and the reputation is built almost entirely on one mistaken assumption: that it will behave like the goose people eat at Christmas. A farmed goose is one of the fattest birds in the kitchen. A wild Canada that has flown a thousand miles is one of the leanest, and it is closer in every practical sense to a piece of beef than to poultry. Cook it as poultry and you get the grey, livery, chewy thing that put people off. Cook it as beef and it is excellent.

What you are actually working with

The breast is a steak. Dark, dense, almost purple, and best treated exactly like a lean beef steak: seasoned, seared hard, cooked to medium-rare, rested, and sliced across the grain. Cooked beyond medium it turns dry and increasingly livery.

There is almost no fat. Whatever fat a wild goose has sits under the skin and there is not much of it, especially in a bird taken late in the season after a long migration. The plate has to supply what the bird does not.

The legs are working muscle and full of sinew. Like upland birds, the legs and the breast are two different ingredients. Legs want long, slow, moist cooking - confit, braise, or into a stew or a pie. They are genuinely good treated that way and genuinely awful roasted alongside the breast.

Diet matters. Grain-field geese are mild and sweet. Birds feeding on tidal marsh or on rougher forage are stronger. Snow geese in particular vary widely.

The three things a wild goose plate needs

Fat, added at the plate. Butter sauces, bacon, cream, duck fat on the potatoes. The bird brings none.

Acid and fruit. The dark, almost livery character of goose is met best by sharp fruit: cherry, plum, blackcurrant, cranberry, apple. This is where the classic goose-and-fruit tradition comes from, and it works for exactly the same reason it works with duck.

Sweet earthy starch. Sweet potato, parsnip, squash, or a potato dish rich enough to matter.

Sides that genuinely work

• Sour cherry or plum sauce, made properly tart. Reduce pan juices and stock, add fruit, finish with butter.
• Braised red cabbage with apple, which is the traditional answer and still the best one.
• Potato dauphinoise or fondant potatoes, for the fat the bird lacks.
• Roasted parsnips or squash, caramelised hard.
• Wild rice with mushrooms and bacon, especially with braised leg meat.
• Bitter leaves - chicory, radicchio, watercress - sharply dressed.
• Horseradish or a mustard cream, which suits the beefiness of the breast surprisingly well.

Herbs and spices that belong

Juniper and bay for braises. Thyme throughout. Star anise, one piece, in a braising liquid. Orange zest with the breast. Black pepper, generously. Allspice and clove, sparingly, in a winter stew. Smoked paprika or chipotle works on goose in a way it does not on most game, particularly for jerky, pastrami-style cures and anything smoked - which is the other genuinely excellent route for goose breast.

Wine and other drinks

Because the breast eats like beef, treat it like beef: Syrah, Malbec, a Rhône blend, or a ripe Zinfandel. With a fruit-forward sauce, a Pinot Noir works. For braised leg dishes, a rustic red from the pot. For smoked or pastrami-style goose, a dark beer is honestly a better match than any wine.

Without alcohol, tart cherry juice with sparkling water repeats the sauce, and a strong cold black tea handles the smoked preparations.

The mistakes that spoil good birds

• Cooking the breast past medium-rare. This is the whole ballgame with goose, and nearly every bad experience traces back to it.
• Roasting the whole bird. Unless you are braising it slowly in liquid, a whole wild goose in the oven produces one dry breast and two tough legs. Break it down.
• Leaving the skin on when it will not crisp. On a lean late-season bird there is rarely enough fat to render a good skin. Skinning the breast and cooking it like a steak is usually the better call; keep the skin only when the bird is genuinely fat.
• Not trimming. Remove all silverskin, any bloodshot flesh and any shot damage. Goose is unforgiving about these in a way that a fattier bird is not.
• Ignoring the legs. Confit goose legs are one of the best things in the whole game kitchen, and most hunters throw them away.

The two routes worth knowing

There are two things wild goose does better than almost any other game, and they are worth planning a season around. The first is the seared breast, sliced, with a tart fruit sauce - a genuinely fine dish that takes fifteen minutes. The second is cured and smoked breast, pastrami-style: brined, spiced with pepper and coriander, cold-smoked and steamed, sliced thin. That second route turns even a strong, late-season bird into something people ask for, and it is the standard answer to a freezer full of snow geese.

For plucking, breasting out and the rest of the handling, see from the harvest; for brines, cures and smoking, see preserving game.