For Stuffing
1 quart fine breadcrumbs 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls salt 2 tablespoonfuls chopped onion 1 lemon 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1/4 teaspoonful powdered thyme 1/4 teaspoonful white pepper 1 egg 1 cupful country sausage A little warm water 1 turkey Salt pork Mix sausage with breadcrumbs, add egg well beaten, Crisco, seasonings, grated rind and strained juice of lemon, and moisten with a little hot water. Be careful not to make stuffing too moist. See that turkey is well plucked, singed and wiped; fold over pinions, and pass skewer through them, thick part of legs and body, catching leg and pinning it on other side; now secure bottom part of leg, which should have feet cut off half way to first joint, fill breast of bird with stuffing and skewer down skin. Place 2 strips salt pork in bottom of roasting pan, lay in turkey and place several strips salt pork over breast and sprinkle lightly with flour. Roast in hot oven, allowing fifteen minutes to the pound. Baste occasionally with melted Crisco. Serve hot decorated with cooked onions, celery tips, cranberries, and parsley.
A bread-and-sausage stuffing from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbooks, given with full instructions for trussing and roasting the bird. Most of what needs updating is the roasting, not the stuffing.
- The hinge: stuffing temperatureRaw bulk sausage packed into a bird's cavity is the one part of this recipe that demands a thermometer. The centre of the stuffing must reach 165F, and in a stuffed turkey the breast will often overshoot before it gets there. Baking the stuffing in a buttered dish alongside the bird solves the problem entirely.
- "Hot oven" and 15 minutes to the poundPeriod sources put a hot oven somewhere around 400-450F, though the book gives no figure. At that sort of heat, fifteen minutes per pound will scorch the salt pork and dry the breast long before a stuffed cavity is safe. Modern practice roasts a turkey at 325-350F and works to internal temperature rather than a per-pound rule.
- A quart of fine breadcrumbsThat is 4 cups — day-old bread grated or rubbed through a sieve, not the sandy commercial crumb. Dry and fresh crumbs differ a good deal in weight per cup, so weigh rather than measure by volume if you want consistency.
- CriscoStill sold, but reformulated more than once since 1915 and no longer the same product. Butter at the same measure gives a better stuffing; for basting, melted butter or the pan drippings work as well as melted shortening.
- Country sausageBulk breakfast sausage meat, sage-forward and fairly fatty — not links, and not cased. If you can only find links, slit and strip them. One cupful is about 8 oz.
- Salt pork and flourThe strips are barding, laid on to keep the breast from drying in a fierce oven. Blanch modern salt pork briefly if it is very salty. The light dusting of flour is there to brown and thicken the drippings for gravy.
- Trussing and pinionsPinions are the wing tips. The skewering method described assumes a bird sold with feet and wing tips attached; a supermarket turkey needs only the legs tied and the wings tucked under.
- YieldEnough to fill the breast cavity of a large turkey, or about 1 1/2 quarts of baking dish. Baked separately, allow about 40 minutes at 350F, covered for the first half.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the recipe books that followed it put the brand name into every list of ingredients, here in a stuffing that would traditionally have used butter or the bird's own fat. The stuffing itself is thoroughly conventional for the period — breadcrumbs, sausage meat, onion, parsley, thyme, and the grated rind and juice of a lemon, which was standard practice in Anglo-American forcemeats long before it was fashionable to call it brightness. The instructions for plucking, singeing and skewering are a reminder that a turkey still arrived largely whole, and that dressing the bird was part of the cook's job rather than the butcher's.