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Stuffing for Lamb (Cups soft bread crumbs)
2 cups soft bread crumbs. 1 tablespoon poultry seasoning. 1/4 cup butter. 1/4 cup hot water. 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion. 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
Salt, Pepper.
PROCESS: Melt butter in hot water, add to bread crumbs, toss lightly with a fork. Add remaining ingredients in the order given. If desired moister, increase the quantity of hot water.
A plain bread stuffing meant to be packed into a boned shoulder or a crown of lamb before roasting. It comes together in five minutes; the only decisions are moisture and seasoning.
- Soft bread crumbsThese are fresh crumbs torn or grated from the inside of a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Two cups is roughly three or four slices of white bread with the crusts off; dried crumbs will drink far more water and turn pasty.
- Poultry seasoningA commercial blend, then as now, built on sage and thyme with marjoram, savory or rosemary alongside. A full tablespoon in two cups of crumbs is assertive; start with two teaspoons if your jar is fresh, since an old blend will have faded.
- The onion is rawIt goes in uncooked and finely chopped, which suits a stuffing that will sit in a roast for an hour. If you are baking the stuffing separately in a shorter time, soften the onion in the butter first or it will stay sharp and crunchy.
- MoistureA quarter cup of water with the butter gives a loose, crumbly stuffing that holds together only when packed. For a moister, more sliceable result, work up to about half a cup, adding it a spoonful at a time — bread crumbs go from dry to sodden quickly.
- YieldTwo cups of crumbs will fill a small boned shoulder, on the order of four pounds, serving perhaps four to six; a crown roast would likely need double.
- Temperature inside the roastStuffing packed into meat insulates itself and heats slowly. Take the centre of the stuffing to 165F, which for lamb usually means the meat itself finishes past the pink stage; cooks who want the lamb rarer should bake the stuffing in a separate dish, buttered, about 30 minutes at 350F.
- ButterA quarter cup melted into hot water will not emulsify — it floats. Pour it over the crumbs while still hot and toss immediately with a fork so the fat coats the bread rather than pooling at the bottom of the bowl.
Elizabeth O. Hiller compiled 52 Sunday Dinners in 1913 for the American housewife planning a full year of weekly roasts, and the book's structure — a dinner a week, each with its own accompaniments — explains why a stuffing appears as a standalone numbered recipe rather than buried in the lamb instructions. Bread stuffings of this kind, crumbs bound with butter and water and carried by sage, are generally traced to English forcemeats. The tablespoon of "poultry seasoning" is the period detail: packaged herb blends were available to American cooks, and Hiller's recipe trusts the reader to have a tin on the shelf rather than a garden of separate herbs. Using a poultry blend in lamb was unremarkable — sage and onion were understood as the seasoning for stuffing, whatever the meat around it.