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Stuffing for Same
One cup of cracker or stale bread crumbs. Season with one salt spoonful each of salt, pepper, thyme or marjoram, and moisten with a quarter of a cup of melted butter. Add hot water if a moist stuffiing be desired.
A plain bread stuffing of the sort printed as a companion to a roast or a bird earlier on the page. It is short on quantity by modern standards, so scale before you commit.
- Salt spoonfulA saltspoon is the smallest spoon in a Victorian place setting, roughly a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of salt, pepper and dried thyme or marjoram for the cup of crumbs.
- YieldOne cup of crumbs plus butter makes about a cup and a quarter of stuffing, enough for a small bird, a pair of chops or a few tomatoes or onions. For a 12 lb turkey you will need several times this, on the order of eight batches.
- Crackers versus breadPeriod crackers were typically plain, dry soda or common crackers, generally less salty than a modern cracker. If you use salted crackers, cut the added salt back or leave it out.
- Stale bread means dry breadThe crumbs should be genuinely dry so they absorb the butter and any liquid without turning to paste. Day-old bread torn and left out, or crumbs dried in a 300F oven for ten minutes, both work.
- The moisteningAdd hot water a tablespoon at a time until the crumbs clump when pressed but no liquid runs out. Stock or the pan drippings give far more flavour than water and behave identically.
- Cooking itThe recipe assumes the stuffing goes into meat and cooks with it. Stuffing inside poultry must reach 165F at the centre, which usually means the bird itself overcooks; baking it in a separate dish at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, covered, avoids the problem.
- The butter is not optionalA quarter cup for one cup of crumbs is a high proportion, and it is what keeps a crumb stuffing from drying to sand. Reducing it and compensating with water produces a pasty result.
Bread stuffings like this one are the frugal end of a very old tradition: forcemeat, from the French farce, originally meant a seasoned meat paste bound with eggs and used to fill everything from a boned capon to a pastry coffin. By the turn of the twentieth century the American household version had shed the meat and most of the eggs, leaving stale bread or broken crackers, butter, salt, pepper and one aromatic herb. Thyme and marjoram appear again and again in these books. The instruction to add hot water "if a moist stuffing be desired" is a reminder that dry, crumbly stuffing was a legitimate preference rather than a failure, and suggests that cooks may have been expected to know their own household's taste without being told.