Apart from being our most enduring Christmas story, A Christmas Carol marks the point at which the interloping turkey supplanted the goose at its place of honour at the Christmas table. The prize turkey – “Not the little prize Turkey: the big one” – has been hanging in the poulterer’s window, much coveted perhaps but outside the range of most people’s pockets. By the time the reformed Scrooge sends this obese bird, the Cratchit family have already devoured a goose down to “one small atom of bone”. The sense of the story is that a goose was a somewhat meagre ration.

Geese were considered tough and were, of course, much smaller than a turkey and therefore less capable of feeding the average Victorian household. The Cratchit family’s goose was not exceptional but their appreciation of it most certainly was: “There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family . . . ” One of Simon Hopkinson’s most popular recipes has been that for goose stuffed with mashed potatoes flavoured with onions, garlic sage and lemon rind, an idea he borrowed from that dissolute but legendary restaurateur Peter Langan. The Cratchit goose was not stuffed with the potatoes but with a traditional sage and onion stuffing but the same themes – apple, potato, sage, onion and chestnut – recur whenever wise cooks consider a goose. Neither Dickens nor Mrs Cratchit erred from this path.