Hold the Turkey -- Nothing's Tame About the Taste of Wild Goose

By Angus Phillips
Sunday, November 25, 2007

Christmas is coming,

The goose is getting fat,

Please put a penny in the old man's hat.

Now that Thanksgiving is out of the way and we're down to the last few leftovers in the fridge, it's time to give voice to an inconvenient truth. Everybody loves the hoopla and cheer that goes with roasting a giant, plump, farm-raised turkey for a crowd of loved ones at harvest time. But the fact is, a commercial bird that spent its whole short life in a darkened, temperature-controlled barn eating steroid-laden gruel has all the zest and character of a tub of cottage cheese.

For flavor, for the rich, wild, tangy, gamy, dark and murky complexities of a real meat, give me a wild goose every time.

With Christmas just around the bend, it's high time to cook a goose or two. Conveniently, Canada geese are pouring south on the wings of the northwest winds, settling to feed the winter away in grain fields and pastures from Winchester, Va., to Ocean City and filling the night air with their eerie goose music.

The warm weather this fall led to a slow start to migratory goose hunting here. Who ever saw leaves still on the trees at Thanksgiving? But enough honkers had made their way south by last week that we got in a couple of modestly productive hunts.

Geese flew wild and wary, up and down the creek across from Wye Island on the Eastern Shore, and a few mistook our floating decoys for the real deal and fluttered down to fatal landings. A few days later, in a turf field on the Chesapeake's Western Shore near the base of the Bay Bridge, we had two small flocks tumble down to investigate the decoys, and four birds fell to the gun.

Few views in this world are as breathtaking as the one you get from a goose blind as a group of wild birds circles overhead, craning necks and cupping wings as they ponder whether to take the plunge. Mostly they opt out, decoys being just decoys and goose calls being less than perfect, especially in the hands of amateurs like us.

But once in awhile it all comes together, and the great black wings stay cupped and, silhouetted against a gray and stormy sky, the birds come fluttering down, silent and vulnerable. I'll tell you, if on my deathbed the last vision that comes to mind is of Canada geese tumbling down to a stand of decoys on a windswept creek, I'll go willingly, with a happy sigh.

Anyway, there you are at the end of the day with a goose or two in hand, which to some folks is an inconvenience. Most modern hunters have no interest in plucking a goose, so they trundle them off to some commercial picking house where a big feather-plucking machine is whirring away in the back, and beefy guys in aprons with meat cleavers toss your birds on the floor and give you a ticket and instructions to come back in a day or two to collect a frozen block in a plastic bag.

That's not for me. I love everything about a goose, even the plucking. A wild goose needs to be hung for a few days. You get home, pluck a few feathers from the base of the rib cage, slice the skin and reach in and remove the organs. Then you hang the birds in the tool shed, where it stays cool.

A few days later, you settle down with a stool and a trash can on the back porch and pull out the feathers by hand, then cut off the wings and feet, scorch the pinfeathers out with a torch and run the carcass under cold water while you pluck off any remaining imperfections.

Your goose now is ready for the pan. But how to cook it?

"Oh, no!" I can hear Jeff Nicklason groaning all the way from Marlow Heights, where he's reading this on his computer. "You're not going to give us that goose recipe again?" Oh, yes I am, Jeffrey.

Wild birds are not like farm-raised ones, you see. They have to get their food the old-fashioned way, so they fly and walk and peck and scratch and wind up lean. They are not injected with globs of fat that render them unable to walk, but melt like butter when you cook them.

To make a wild bird tender, you must add moisture, cook slowly and take pains to keep the moisture in. My goose recipe comes from an old chef at Capt. Buddy Harrison's Chesapeake House on Tilghman Island. He learned it from his mother in Mississippi, and I no longer need to write it down as it is engraved in my memory.

The ingredients are: One green pepper, a handful of celery, a few cloves of garlic, an onion, some oregano and a jigger of Jack Daniel's whiskey. Combine these ingredients in a blender, whirl it up into a bright green goo, apply the goo liberally inside and outside the goose, then cover your pan with two layers of aluminum foil and roast at 225 degrees for six hours.

The meat will fall off the bones and the sauce will be perfect just as it lies. The only danger with this recipe is that you may grow faint with pleasure, just from inhaling the fumes as the goose cooks. So be careful.

Migratory goose season is closed briefly in Maryland during the firearms season for deer, but reopens Dec. 15, leaving plenty of time to bag a few birds for Christmas dinner. It sure beats the alternatives of a store-bought ham or another dreaded farm-raised butterball.

Goose hunting seasons:

Maryland migratory geese (Eastern counties): Dec. 15-Jan. 26.

Maryland resident geese (Western counties): Nov. 26-Feb. 15.

Virginia migratory geese (Eastern counties): Nov. 17-Dec. 1; Dec. 21-Jan. 26.

Virginia resident geese (Western counties): Nov. 17-Dec. 1; Dec. 21-Feb. 15.