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Stuffing (Cup bread crumbs cup melted)
1 cup bread crumbs 1/4 cup melted butter 2 tablespoons boiling water 1/4 teaspoon salt Pepper 1/4 teaspoon thyme
This is an ingredient list with the method stripped away, as often happened in flour-company booklets where a single procedure served a page of variations. The proportions are sound; the working notes below fill in what the page assumes you already know.
- What to do with itToss the crumbs with salt, pepper and thyme, pour over the melted butter, then sprinkle in the boiling water and lift with a fork until evenly damp. It should clump when squeezed and fall apart again, not form a paste.
- "Bread crumbs" means soft crumbs"Bread crumbs" most likely means soft crumbs -- in this period the phrase generally meant the crumb of day-old bread rubbed or torn into loose pieces rather than the fine dry crumbs sold in a canister, which were usually specified as "dry" or "cracker" crumbs. Dry packaged crumbs will absorb the liquid and set into a dense mass; roughly a couple of slices of stale bread, crusts off, torn small, will give about a cup.
- Quantity and yieldOne cup of crumbs makes roughly a cup of loose stuffing, enough for a couple of large tomatoes, a handful of mushroom caps, a small fish or a single chicken breast pocket. A roasting chicken will need several times this quantity, and a turkey a good deal more.
- The butter is not a misprintA quarter cup of butter to one cup of crumbs reads as a great deal by modern habit, but the fat is what keeps the crumbs separate and browning rather than steaming. Reduce it much and the result tends to be dry.
- ThymeA quarter teaspoon almost certainly means dried leaf thyme; sage and summer savory were used interchangeably in stuffings of this kind. If using fresh, use about three times as much and strip the leaves from the stems.
- Cooking temperatureStuffing packed inside a bird must reach 165F at its centre, which usually means the bird itself runs past that point. Baked separately in a buttered dish, 350F for 20-25 minutes gives a crisp top.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills. A bare list like this one, with no method, reads as written for a cook who already knows how bread stuffing is made and only wants to check the ratio. The formula itself -- crumbs, butter, a splash of hot liquid, salt, pepper and a single herb -- is the plain American household stuffing found in nineteenth-century cookery books, with thyme, sage or summer savory used more or less interchangeably. A stuffing of this size suits stuffed vegetables, fish and single joints rather than a holiday bird.