It didn’t end there, though. In the Old World there was a culinary tradition that has been all but forgotten among American Jews: a Hanukkah goose. When Hanukkah fell on the Sabbath, Jewish families of means would host a feast with roast goose, latkes fried in its schmaltz and most likely pickled vegetables. “The smell of smoking goose fat became the traditional scent” of Hanukkah, Michael Wex says in his book “Rhapsody in Schmaltz.”

In fact, the waterfowl played a major role in Jewish cooking in prewar Europe. It was the preferred meat for those able to afford it. The French food writer Édouard de Pomiane wrote in 1929 that the goose was a “beneficent animal” for the Jews of Poland as it supplied so much to a household, from feathers for bedding to flesh for roasting to fats for rendering.

Despite the goose’s copious gifts, it has fallen out of favor. Today it’s hard to find goose meat. In New York City, select butcher shops take Christmas orders, but they’re pricey and increasingly uncommon. Finding a kosher goose is nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive. Two years ago I paid $250 for a nine-pound kosher goose that was specially raised, ritually slaughtered, then delivered by the farmer himself.

The difficulty of the goose chase isn’t primarily that people’s tastes have changed, but that our food system has. Poultry farms made the transition from family operations to factories in the postwar period. Chickens, with the help of intensive breeding practices and the introduction of antibiotics, are now reared in large farms generally known as confined-animal feeding operations. Geese are temperamental and aggressive, making them harder to confine. And since they prefer to graze and can’t entirely subsist on grain, it is even harder to raise them at scale, meaning slimmer profit margins.

For Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States, there was much to celebrate about eating in the mid-20th century. Foods were comparatively cheaper than in Europe and convenience took priority. Jewish cooks, mostly women at the time, began spending their days either in the work force or tending to matters of the home rather than rendering schmaltz. The introduction of inexpensive vegetable shortening and seed oils transformed Jewish kitchens and turned the goose into even more of a luxurious proposition once its fat, one of the primary reasons the animal was reared in the first place, was considered unnecessary.