Current Session Available:

November 10-11th, 2023

Tickets: $1,045; limit 8 tickets.

On the first day, you will artfully slaughter, de-feather and eviscerate a goose fattened on the pasture of St Martin’s Summer, corn and acorns.  As usual, the class size will be small to keep the hands-on experience undiluted.  We will make pâté from the fresh livers and giblet fry for the slaughter day supper.

The second day will warm the kitchen with pots full of trembling stock and cured goose bubbling in lard.  Among many traditional preparations, we will dry-cure the breasts for magret séché, stuff the neck skin with forcemeat (cou d’oie farci) and end our labor with a feast of roast goose with chestnut stuffing in honor of St Martin.

Goose is traditionally under the protection of St Martin of Tours who, humbly fleeing being ordained a bishop, was flushed from his hiding place by a flock of noisy geese.

By the end of the course we will not only have harvested the entirety of the goose, but put each part to the highest and best use.

Provided with a traveling cooler, you will go home with jars of confit goose, with magret séché, cou d’oie farci and a clean carcass for making broth.

“…the confits are really farmhouse preparations, for the protracted convenience of a single, often isolated, family.” -Jane Grigson

This is an earnest hands-on course.  The goal is to impart the actual virtue of goose provender, from kill to confit.  The meat and especially the fat of the goose opens up a new horizon of culinary efficiency and flavor.  Potatoes cooked in the confit lard, for example, are superior not just in degree but in kind to all other potatoes preparations.  The addition of goose confit to the modest pot of dried beans nobly exalts legumes to flavors seemingly beyond their nature.

We will finish each day with a feast made from the fruits of our labors.