What a gaggle

❍ The most important thing to remember when cooking a goose, according to Ollie White, is to place it on a rack so that the fat runs away (put it on the spuds) and the skin becomes crispy. Farm2fork delivers meat boxes of grassfed lamb, beef, chicken and goose nationwide (www.farm2fork.co.uk)

❍ One medium goose egg is roughly equivalent to two large chicken eggs. The whites are runnier than a hen’s, but the yolks are richer. It takes about 10 minutes to soft-boil a goose egg. To find your local goosemeat (or egg) producer, visit www.gooseproducers.co.uk ❍ Geese make useful lawnmowers and can live mainly on grass if it’s got enough goodness—a quarter of an acre should be enough for a pair— with supplementary wheat. They love vegetable scraps, but don’t give them layers mash—it sticks in their beaks

❍ A goose can be a life’s work— they can live up to the age of 20. They must have a mate—a single goose will become distressed

❍ Geese don’t need a pond—a plastic pool will suffice—except for mating, which they prefer to do on water, but they do need to be ushered to bed at night in a locked shed safe from predators

❍ The expression ‘your goose is cooked’ comes from the burning of the 15th-century German martyr John Hus (rhymes with goose), as in ‘Hus is cooked’

❍ Tennyson’s 1842 poem The Goose, in which a poor old woman is delivered a goose that lays a golden egg, is a political allegory and moral tale, written at the time of the controversial Reform Bill, to expose the illusory promises made by Radicals to the struggling classes