2417. Sauce for the goose

Quite frankly, Mavis, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. He sent you on a wild goose chase, and you were as silly as a goose to follow.

You knew from the start that he was loose as a goose. Before that you wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and now you’ve really cooked your goose. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.

I told you to tell him that you were making a wigwam for a goose’s bridle, but no! you had to have him think you were the goose that laid the golden egg.

It’s why I baked you a gooseberry pie and written down a list of ways you’ve plucked your goose. Take a gander while you eat instead of swanning around like a peacock.

1894. Wild game

Pieter had an obsession with wild game. He had tried to eat as many legitimate wild things as possible. He not only hunted them, just one of every variety, but he thoroughly researched the best possible way to cook them. What was the best way to prepare wild pork, for example? Did one devour it with an accompanying apple sauce or perhaps wild blueberry chutney?

His list of tasty wild creatures was comprehensive. His favourite game taste at present stood at wild turkey, although the drumsticks of a wild turkey were quite stringy and tough. It must be because of all the running and scratching these wild birds do. But it was far tastier than the domestic turkey and quite different. People don’t realize.

Of course, although it was legitimate to hunt some things Pieter stopped at having grilled bat. One never quite knew what dingy guano-riddled cave the bats had been in. Besides, Chinese cooking wasn’t Pieter’s favourite form of culinary delight.

Although wild moose meat was good enough there was an awful lot of it. A single animal filled Pieter’s freezer. His wife wouldn’t touch moose – “too gamey” – so Pieter spent months ploughing through the moose carcass. He was not one to waste things, but by the end of it he was totally sick of elk.

There were two creatures on Pieter’s list that he had never tried: wild hare and wild swan. Where he lived one could hunt swan, although numbers hunted by each hunter was limited. Still, one needed only the one to try it. And then Lady Luck stepped in!

A friend gave Pieter a hare and a swan on the same day. The same day! Pieter was ecstatic. “When shall we eat them?” asked Pieter’s wife. Pieter knew exactly what they would do:

HARE TODAY, SWAN TOMORROW.