They may be notoriously vicious and loud, but, once cooked, geese promise succulent dark meat and delectably tasty fat, especially at Christmas, says Tom Parker Bowles.
‘The goose,’ mused doctor and scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, ‘is the most beautiful emblem of prudence.’ He goes on to describe how the birds not only lower their heads when passing under bridges, ‘no matter how high the arches are’, but put a pebble in their beak when crossing a mountain…