Home › Meats › STUFFING (Cup bread crumbs tablespoon)
STUFFING (Cup bread crumbs tablespoon)
1 cup bread crumbs 1 tablespoon chopped suet 1 teaspoon minced parsley 1 teaspoon sage 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon onion 1/2 teaspoon pepper Dust of nutmeg Dust of thyme 1 tablespoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 cup oyster liquor or stock 2 well beaten eggs
An ingredient list without a method, in the manner of early promotional cookbooks that assumed the cook knew what to do with a bowl. Combine the dry seasonings with the crumbs, add the butter, lemon and eggs, then the liquor last, and use at once.
- It is much wetter than modern stuffingA full cup of liquid plus two eggs to one cup of crumbs gives a loose, spoonable batter, not the crumbly mixture we now expect. Add the liquid gradually and stop when it just holds together, unless you want the soft custardy result the proportions imply.
- Bread crumbs meant dry crumbsIn this period "bread crumbs" without qualification generally meant stale bread dried and rolled fine, which drinks up far more liquid than fresh soft crumbs. If you use fresh crumbs from a soft loaf, expect to need well under the full cup of stock.
- "1 teaspoon onion"Genuinely ambiguous: it may mean a teaspoon of grated or minced onion, or of onion juice, both of which were common measures. A teaspoon of minced onion is the safer reading, and it is a very light hand either way.
- A teaspoon of dried sage is a lotA teaspoon of sage is a lot -- Ground sage is potent, and a teaspoon to a single cup of crumbs will dominate the mixture. Start with half and taste the raw mixture before the eggs go in.
- SuetBeef suet is sold by butchers and sometimes frozen in supermarkets; shredded packaged suet also works. A tablespoon is a small amount, there for richness rather than structure, and butter alone will do if you cannot find it.
- Oyster liquorThe strained liquid from shucked oysters. Bottled clam juice or a light fish stock is the nearest substitute; plain chicken stock changes the character but not the texture.
- Cooking itWith this much egg the mixture sets. Baked in a buttered dish at 350F it firms in roughly 30 to 40 minutes; dropped in small spoonfuls into simmering (not boiling) broth it poaches into soft dumplings in a few minutes.
- YieldAbout two cups of mixture, enough to stuff a small fish or a pair of birds, or to make eight to ten forcemeat balls for soup.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchens made a great deal of forcemeat, seasoned crumb-and-egg mixtures rolled into balls and poached in broth as a garnish for clear soups, mock turtle above all. The oyster liquor here points the same way, since oyster soups and oyster-garnished stews were standard American cold-weather fare when shellfish were cheap. The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the many booklets issued by milling companies, in this case Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis, forerunner of General Mills, to put their brand in the hands of home cooks; in such books entries often arrive as bare ingredient lists with the method left to the reader's experience.