Clean and season the turkey with salt and pepper. Then fill with 2 cups of bread-crumbs mixed with a lump of butter, some chopped onion and thyme, salt and pepper to taste, ½ cup of seeded raisins and ½ cup of nuts. Mix all well with 2 beaten eggs. Put turkey in dripping-pan and let bake a rich brown. Baste often with the dripping until tender. Serve with dressing.
The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to roast a bird; what they omit are the numbers. Everything below fills those gaps.
- Stuffing quantityTwo cups of crumbs plus the fruit and nuts makes only about three cups of stuffing, enough for a small bird; for anything in the 12-16 lb range you will want to multiply it several times over. However much you make, the cavity should be loosely packed, not compressed, or the centre will not heat through.
- The hinge: stuffing temperatureBread stuffing bound with two beaten eggs and sitting inside a raw bird must reach 165F at its centre. Check the stuffing with a thermometer, not the bird alone, or bake the mixture in a buttered dish alongside the turkey.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; recipes of this kind generally assumed a cook judging the oven by hand or experience rather than by a dial. Start at 425F for 30 minutes to set the "rich brown" the recipe wants, then drop to 325F for the remainder, roughly 13-15 minutes per pound for an unstuffed bird and a little longer when filled.
- "A lump of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons, melted and poured over the crumbs. It is there to keep the stuffing from drying, so err toward the larger amount if the bread is stale and hard.
- NutsUnspecified, as period recipes often are. Walnuts or hazelnuts suit the Swiss flavouring; chop them coarsely and toast them first, since they will not crisp inside a wet stuffing.
- Dripping-pan and bastingA dripping-pan is simply a shallow roasting pan; a rack keeps the skin from stewing. Basting every 30 minutes is plenty, and each opening of the door costs heat, so work quickly.
- "Serve with dressing"The dressing is the stuffing itself, spooned out and served beside the carved meat rather than left in the carcass. Modern practice is to remove it as soon as the bird leaves the oven.
- Doneness"Until tender" means 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Rest the bird 20 to 30 minutes before carving.
- YieldA 10 lb turkey with this stuffing serves 6 to 8, with meat left for the French turkey soup that follows on the next page.
The raisins and nuts in the stuffing are perhaps what suggest the "Swiss" label: sweetened and fruited bread fillings for poultry are often said to belong to the Alpine and southern German-speaking regions, where dried fruit was a staple of winter cooking and turns up in meat dishes as readily as in desserts. Turkey itself reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century and was a festive rather than everyday bird well into the twentieth; a book organised as a daily calendar files it in late October. The volume belongs to a popular early twentieth-century genre, the dish-a-day cookbook, which promised the American housewife a year of variety by labelling each recipe with a nationality. The labels were loose, and the neighbouring entries here for a Dutch stuffed goose and a French turkey soup show how the formula worked: one bird, one country, one page.