A festive perspective: fat goose vs wild turkey

Award-winning food writer Michael Raffael muses on the virtues of Britain's favourite Christmas dinner staples.

Last year, over Christmas we ate roast goose and roast turkey. The latter, a Kelly Bronze, was delivered boxed and ripe for stuffing. The goose, though, needed drawing and plucking. It took two frozen-fingered hour-long sessions in a yard to pull out first the feathers, then the down and stubble.

Comparing the two was like confronting Scrooge’s ghosts of Christmases Past and Present: one an oven-ready Jordan-chested bundle of white meat, the other a streamlined package of soluble grease.

The turkey, as it always has done, fed us for days —hot, cold, as sandwiches and in soups. We aren’t a large family. Our goose  was demolished at a sitting, but we had enough delicious fat from it to last until February.

Historically speaking, geese have been part of the British diet since Roman times. Turkeys are relatively recent arrivals. William Strickland, a Yorkshire gentleman, who obtained a turkey-cock crest on his family’s coat of arms in 1551 was probably the earliest British breeder. 

At first,  turkeys were an aristocratic treat, but by Victorian times the growing urban middle classes could afford them. They weren’t, in shape at least, like their modern successors. Angular they had pectorals that were more Sylvester Stallone than Jordan. To carve one  required dexterity. Display and theatre mattered as much as the taste. The yield of  meat was often little more than on a well-fleshed goose.

Breeding improvements in the twentieth century changed the look. The introduction of “broad” or “double-breasted” turkeys, rounded the contours and doubled the meat yield  to about 60 percent.

British geese, on the other hand, apart from some cross-breeding, haven’t changed. A generation ago they had almost vanished as a table bird. In his classic, the Cook’s Encyclopaedia (1980), Tom Stobart claimed: “Apart from its bloody-minded attitude to being mechanized, the goose, for modern tastes, is considered rather fat.”

Since then, they have regained a measure of past popularity. Last year about 300,000 were sold. The two factors that worked against them, now make them desirable. High levels of mono-unsaturated fat, instead of being a handicap, are viewed as a positive attribute, linked to the healthy Mediterranean diet. Reared extensively and grown on  a limited scale they benefit from a “small is beautiful image”.

There has also been a role reversal. Relatively hard to find , except in the countryside, their scarcity has made them attractive again whereas the once high status turkey is affordable to most of the population. Ten million each year are sacrificed over the festive season. 90 percent of  these are reared on large farms.

Of the remainder the majority is produced semi-intensively. A small fraction is fully free-range. Kelly Bronze birds belongs to this last category. Created in 1984 by selecting and crossing Bronze turkeys (the name comes from colour tints on the black feathers), they are a  revived, once fashionable breed that had been supplanted by flocks of commercial white-feathered birds. From a standing start numbers have grown to over 62,000 in 2006.

Grown slowly on prime rations they cost more to produce. Hand-plucked, properly hung, they develop a characteristic gamy taste, closer to a pheasant’s than a chicken’s. They are sold complete with a meat temperature probe so that they can be roasted to a precise degree of ‘doneness’.

This year, farmer Paul Kelly, whose father Derek revived the breed, let loose a 2000 strong semi-wild flock in an Essex copse, fenced off against foxes. It’s a means of returning turkeys to their natural habitat. Whether it alters their shape or taste remains to be seen, but it will reduce, he says,  his farming input. He won’t be charging a premium for these because they don’t cost him more. No doubt, on the basis of curiosity value alone, he could.

The motives for buying goose rather than turkey, Kelly Bronze rather than Bernard Matthews and a “wild” rather than a farmed turkey engage all sorts of instincts: a harmless form of food snobbery;  the urge to be different; a genuine concern for more natural or healthy food. There should be, though, an overriding reason determining choice: enjoyment.

And there’s the nub. Turkey and goose, by any epicurean measure aren’t comparable. One is rich and fatty. Those who love it will fight for a share of the skin. The other is pre-eminently lean and, properly cooked, succulent. Nor are the trimmings and tracklements the same. So maybe the ideal solution is to do what I did —order both. After all there are twelve days of Christmas in which to feast on them.

06 December 2007