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Alimentary, My Dear Watson!
I blame Dickens for my household’s attempt to cook a Christmas goose some years ago. My wife and I had always been charmed by the Cratchit family’s dinner of goose and Christmas pudding depicted in the 1999 TV version of A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart. We followed Julia Child’s instructions to the letter, but did not have the “tight-fitting lid” for our roasting pan that is so critical for properly rendering the bird prior to roasting. For weeks after, I felt as if everything I touched in the house—my eyeglasses, my computer keyboard—was coated with a fine film of goose fat. It’s not a fowl I desire to ever eat again. The Cratchit bird fed eight, and I get it. One slice of that rich meat is all anyone needs to survive winter.
I’ve since come to respect geese. The living specimens are fierce protectors of their turf who figure prominently in ancient art. In Rome people told us that if you didn’t have a dog, you could rely on a goose to keep your yard safe from intruders. No one wants to be bitten in the butt by an angry honker.
Alas, when the fowl shows up in literature, it’s usually on someone’s plate. The “unimpeachable” goose who is the star of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” starts out alive, then ends up dead and the centerpiece of a mystery. Interestingly, as we shall see, that goose kept coughing up mysteries well into the 20th century.
The 8,000-word story is the only Christmas tale in the Sherlock Holmes Canon.1 It first appeared in the January 1892 edition of The Strand magazine. (You’ll find it in the first book of collected stories, The Adventures.) If you know your Holmes, it’s the story that starts with the great man deducing the heck out of a bowler hat that has lost its owner, and later confronting a nervous amateur jewel thief who has stolen a precious gem—a blue carbuncle—from the belongings of a countess lodged at a London hotel. To keep the jewel safe until he can consult with his fence, the thief thrusts the gem down the throat of a living goose in his sister’s backyard. The goose gets switched on him, is sent to market, and zaniness ensues.
I reread the story recently to see what sort of Christmasy details Conan Doyle folded into his prose. They’re sparse; mostly Watson describing cold weather, warm fires, a cast of chilly characters, and ice crystals forming in windows. There are no Christmas trees or presents. Since the story is nearly 133 years old, I don’t think I’m spoiling anyone’s enjoyment by revealing that in the end, Holmes lets the repentant thief off scot-free. Because, he argues, “it’s the season of forgiveness.”
I enjoyed the story immensely this time around, and then foolishly read all the notes about it in my copy of Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.2 That’s how I learned that serious Sherlockians have long quibbled with fine points of the tale.
Some examples should suffice. A carbuncle is a garnet, which are typically red. Though they have been found in other colors, there’s no such thing as a blue carbuncle. No garnets have ever been found in the Chinese river Holmes mentions as the origin of this stone. The detective botches a discussion of the jewel’s weight, presumed value, and chemical composition. The law enforcement official in the story conducts a hardness test on the stone that does not prove what he thinks it does. Moreover, of the eleven or so deductions Holmes makes about the bowler, Sherlockians dismiss at least four as highly illogical.
But hey, if our esteemed author couldn’t get the number of Watson’s wives straight, or the location of the shrapnel the good doctor brought back from Afghanistan, why do we expect him to get such details right? Conan Doyle wrote to make glad the heart of geekhood. He was a little like the Hungarian-American director Michael Curtiz, who when someone pointed out all the implausibilities in the script for Casablanca, replied, “Don’t worry. I make it go so fast nobody notices.”
Sometime after WWII, however, a clever female reader proved just how much the largely male membership of Holmes societies knew about geese. Throughout the story, we are told repeatedly that the stolen gem was found in the goose’s crop. That word is mentioned five times in the story. Since many birds do not have teeth, they pre-digest their food by funneling items into a separate anatomical pouch, which is sort of a pre-stomach.
I remembered seeing such a thing as a child, watching my mother butcher a backyard chicken. The bird’s crop was filled with tiny pebbles, which chickens instinctively swallow in their pecking. That grit is later used by the gizzard, the muscular end of the stomach, to grind bugs and vegetation so they can more easily be digested.
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