Terry on 3 Jul 2007  •  Link

Green Geese.
In the early summer, young fattened goslings known as green geese were a popular food.

CGS on 2 Jan 2010  •  Link

Recipe: powered.

Dutch:
http://www.coquinaria.nl/english/…

Ruben on 4 Jan 2010  •  Link

thank you, CGS, for the recipe.
Concerning turkey's taste: the reason for the insipid turkey is that all the turkey's in the market come from a single variety that happens to grow fast in an industrial environment. Same that happens with apples, cucumbers, etc.
I think it was in Tennessee they found lately an original variety from the old days that managed to survive in a remote farm.

CGS on 4 Jan 2010  •  Link

Variety is the spice, one rule or variety is never good, you end up like the Irish , have to leave for better pastures as there be no food.

San Diego Sarah on 2 Jan 2020  •  Link

Geese were very popular fowl in 17th century Europe.

This article is about geese in general, but I particularly liked the end which is a bit off-topic, but indicative of the bird's popularity:

Charles Perrault in 1695 published his collection of fairy tales, "Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye or Tales of My Mother Goose", but Mere l’Oye is mentioned as the already well known purveyor of fairy tales in France as early as 1626.

In 1729, an English translation of Perrault's collection was published by Robert Samber under the title "Histories or Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose". Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood are the most familiar of these tales.

The origins of the stories Charles Perrault collected in 1695 are not necessarily French. For example, there are those who hold that Cinderella is really a story of King Lear’s daughter, Cordelia.

But we stray far from geese in the tempting topic of fairy tales. Why a goose? A goose will murmur to her goslings and perhaps this suggests to an imaginative mind that she’s telling them stories.

The matronly figure wrapped in a shawl and with a tall hat, familiar in children’s book illustrations, suggests the 17th century costume of English Puritans. There is a breed called Pilgrim Geese.

In the pantomime "Harlequin and Mother Goose, or, The Golden Egg", performed at the Drury Lane Theater in 1806–07, Mother Goose has magical powers. These have been in her repertoire at least since Perrault’s collection of stories and rhymes was first published.

The only old rhyme about Mother Goose -- obviously predating the time when geese were bred to gain such weight they could no longer fly:
Old Mother Goose,
When she wanted to wander,
Would ride through the air
On a very fine gander.
Jack's mother came in,
And caught the goose soon,
And mounting its back,
Flew up to the moon.

http://englishhistoryauthors.blog…

San Diego Sarah on 13 Nov 2023  •  Link

The goose was also a symbol of what was lost to the enclosure program that enriched the nobility and made the villagers poor:

“Stealing the Common from the Goose”

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back. -- Anon. 17th century poem.

It appears in OnTheCommon’s book, "Celebrating the Commons: People, Ideas and Stories for a New Year".

Sounds like a Levellers' ditty to me.

https://www.onthecommons.org/maga…