How to cook a Christmas goose the Mme. Benoît way
Have a knitting needle at the ready
In 1969, CBC's Take 30 was celebrating with dinner on Christmas Eve, and viewers were invited to sit at the table with hosts Adrienne Clarkson, Paul Soles, and resident cuisine maven Mme. Jehane Benoît.
The centre of the meal: a roasted Christmas goose, garnished with green onions.
"A lot of people might be afraid of cooking them," said Soles, seated at the head of the table. "Is there any special secret to doing it?"
Also seated at the table were occasional co-host Ed Reid and two guests: Chantal Beauregard and Jacques Gauthier.
'Beautiful things' with fat
"People worry about the fat," Benoît acknowledged. "But after it's been in the oven for about an hour, all you have to do is to take a knitting needle — that's what I use."
A fork would do the job as well, but Benoît said a knitting needle was "best" for the task at hand.
"Be careful because it splurts," she went on, gesturing to indicate what could happen when the needle was deployed. "You push it into each leg, and under each wing. And all the fat comes out."
Her advice was to empty the fat "into a dish," because it was worth holding on to.
"Don't throw it out, because it makes beautiful things afterwards," she instructed. Those things included cassoulet and browned potatoes.
The job wasn't quite done, though. Return the goose to the baking pan, pour "a little" red wine over the top, and "a little" brown sugar on the skin, and put it back in the oven to "finish slowly."
A turkey to remember ... and soda crackers
As they ate, Soles and Clarkson shared their personal special memories of Christmas.
"In 1941, we lost everything we ever owned on Christmas Eve in a war," said Clarkson, who later recalled her origins in Hong Kong when being sworn in as governor general in 1999. "On Christmas Day we were hiding in a basement eating a lot of soda crackers."
She said that Christmas was always "kind of a commemoration of that" for her family — "in a funny sort of way."
Soles — who was the voice of Hermey the Elf in the now-classic 1964 stop-motion animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — also had a Christmas story to tell.
He related a tale of "living and working" in London, Ont., as a younger man employed at a radio station.
"Being Jewish, I was the only person they could stick with the Christmas shift," he said, adding he was "feeling very forlorn" after having recorded a Christmas-themed Bible reading with his sole colleague that day.
"Only two of us sitting in this lonely radio station," he went on. "All of a sudden there was a knock on the door from the Chinese restaurant next door."
He said the restaurant workers, having heard the broadcast, were bearing a tray covered with a napkin.
"There was a very traditional turkey dinner," he said. "And it really made a difference. [We] really had a very pleasant Christmas."
