Clean and season a fat turkey. Stuff with 3 raw potatoes, 2 apples and 1 onion grated. Mix with a lump of butter and 1 cup of bread-crumbs; add 1 egg. Season with sage, thyme, salt and pepper; then put in a dripping-pan. Pour in 1 cup of water and dredge with flour. Let bake in a hot oven until done.
A terse one-paragraph roast of the kind that assumed the cook already knew how to handle a bird. The gaps are all in the numbers: no oven temperature that means anything today, no weight, no time.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in a book of this vintage is usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F. For a whole turkey, that heat is best used for the first 30 minutes to set the skin, then dropped to 325-350F for the remainder; held at high heat throughout, the breast will be dry long before the thighs are done.
- The hinge: cook the stuffing, not just the birdA raw potato-and-apple stuffing packed into the cavity is dense and wet, and it heats slowly. Check the centre of the stuffing as well as the thigh joint; both want 165F. If the bird reaches temperature first, spoon the stuffing into a dish and finish it separately rather than roasting the whole thing longer.
- Grated, not choppedThe text gives "3 raw potatoes, 2 apples and 1 onion grated"; the word most likely governs the whole list, though only the onion is unambiguously grated. Treating all three that way helps: grated potato releases starch that binds the mixture and lets it cook through in the time the bird takes, where diced vegetables may still be hard in the middle.
- Squeeze the potatoThree raw grated potatoes carry a great deal of water. Wring them in a towel before mixing, or the stuffing will steam into a grey paste. A cup of breadcrumbs and one egg is a modest amount of binder for that volume.
- "A lump of butter"Read this as roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. The book gives no measure, so this is an estimate rather than a fixed equivalence.
- Dredging with flourFlour dusted over the wet, buttered skin browns early and gives the pan juices body. It also scorches at high heat, so baste through the first hour and add water to the pan if it threatens to dry out and burn.
- Timing and yieldReckon on roughly 18-21 minutes per pound at 325-350F for a stuffed bird, but go by thermometer rather than clock. A 12-pound turkey serves 10 to 12 with leftovers; the stuffing given here is a modest quantity and would suit a smaller bird, or want increasing for a large one.
- SeasoningSage and thyme are given without amounts. For this quantity of stuffing, a teaspoon of dried sage and half a teaspoon of dried thyme is a reasonable starting point; sage dominates quickly.
The Bavarian signature here is the potato: a stuffing built on grated raw potato with apple and onion belongs to the same south German and Austrian habit that produces raw-potato dumplings and potato-apple fillings for goose. In Bavaria this treatment traditionally goes with goose or duck at Martinmas and Christmas, and attaching it to a turkey is a transposition, mapping a foreign flavour onto the bird an American household would actually be roasting in December. The recipe spends its words on the stuffing and says almost nothing about the roasting itself; that part the cook was expected to know.