Geese in Jane Austen

NotSpaghetti

A green goose is a spring one - young, "green" geese are more delicate and tender. They would have fed on fresh spring grass and greens, rather than being fattened up on grain or harvest leftovers later in the year. I think Christmas Geese were "Stubble Geese".

I don't remember Mansfield Park at all but they were considered a seasonal luxury.

Thank you for the explanation of a green goose NotSpaghetti. I had always thought it referred to the colour of the goose.

I can remember having my chest rubbed with goose grease as a very young child, I think a bit of cloth went on afterwards to try to stop it spreading but I can’t remember a smell from it at all and I think I would have. Heaven knows where the goose grease came from, in the middle of London we certainly didn’t have any but obviously somebody did. I can also remember hot poultices being put on my neck for swollen glands and I hated that too. Makes you realise how lucky we are to have antibiotics now.

Rabbit is very out of fashion now I think. My Dad practically was reared on it, & we did breed rabbits for meat when I was a little girl (they were white with pink eyes & I was a bit traumatised). You could get it from most butchers'. I've never seen rabbit for sale in our local butchers.

I like eating goose, perhaps for the wrong reasons. I am the only one in the family who likes it, so I rarely get to eat it. The wrong reasons? When I lived in St. Albans there was a large gaggle of geese that lived on the common. Maybe 50 of them? They were super aggressive and I got chased by about a dozen of them on the one and only time I walked on the common. When I eat goose it crosses my mind that in a small way, I am getting my own back. They are greasy to eat and as several people have said, there is a lot of fat for relatively little meat.

valdali

Rabbit is very out of fashion now I think. My Dad practically was reared on it, & we did breed rabbits for meat when I was a little girl (they were white with pink eyes & I was a bit traumatised). You could get it from most butchers'. I've never seen rabbit for sale in our local butchers.

My mother-in-law used to make rabbit stew many years ago. The rabbits were sold in a butchers in Leeds market. At one time, a whole aisle was devoted to butchers. Now there are only 2 butchers left in the market and they don't sell anything as at all unusual.

DH was a farm manager so in the seventies I was able to indulge my earth mother culinary ambitions by teaching myself to cook dishes like stuffed pigeon, rabbit stew, pheasant casserole and jugged hare thanks to Mrs Beaton and Elizabeth David. I was in my element and rarely out of the kitchen😂
DH would be only too happy to help local farmers out with machinery repairs if it meant a well stocked freezer!
Those were the days!! 😋