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Potato Stuffing
2 cups hot mashed potato 1 1/4 cups soft stale bread crumbs 1/4 cup finely chopped fat salt pork 1 finely chopped onion 1/3 cup butter 1 egg 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon sage Add to potato, bread crumbs, butter, egg, salt, and sage; then add pork and onion.
Goose Stuffing (Chestnut) 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped shallot 3 tablespoons butter 1/4 lb. sausage meat 12 canned mushrooms, finely chopped 1 cup chestnut puree 1/3 cup stale bread crumbs 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley 24 French chestnuts cooked and left whole Salt and pepper Cook shallot with butter five minutes, add sausage meat, and cook two minutes, then add mushrooms, chestnut puree, parsley, and salt and pepper. Heat to boiling-point, add bread crumbs and whole chestnuts. Cool mixture before stuffing goose.
Duck Stuffing (Peanut) 3/4 cup cracker crumbs 1/2 cup shelled peanuts, finely chopped 1/2 cup heavy cream 2 tablespoons butter Few drops onion juice Salt and pepper Cayenne Mix ingredients in the order given.
Three stuffings for three birds, in the terse style of the period: quantities, then a single line of method. The potato stuffing is the plainest and the most useful, and the one whose one instruction actually matters is temperature, not seasoning.
- Read the potato method as a listThe line "Add to potato, bread crumbs, butter, egg, salt, and sage" means fold each of those into the hot mashed potato in that order, then stir in the salt pork and onion last. The potato should be hot enough to melt the butter but not so hot that it scrambles the egg, so work quickly and beat the egg in after the butter has slackened.
- Salt pork goes in rawThe pork and onion are not pre-cooked here, which means the stuffing must reach a safe temperature inside the bird. Any stuffing containing raw pork and egg needs 165F at its centre, checked with a thermometer pushed into the middle of the cavity, not merely a hot exterior.
- Better baked separatelyLoosely stuffed birds routinely finish before the packed centre does. All three of these mixtures bake well in a buttered dish, 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, basted once or twice with pan drippings, which also gives more browned surface.
- SageA teaspoon here is most likely dried, ground sage, the usual pantry form in cookbooks of this period, though the recipe does not say. Rubbed sage is fluffier and less dense, so the same volume gives rather less sage; fresh sage needs roughly three times as much, chopped fine.
- Chestnut pureeUse unsweetened chestnut puree, not the vanilla-sweetened creme de marrons sold for desserts. "French chestnuts" are the large single-kernel marrons; a 15 oz can of whole cooked chestnuts will go some way toward both the puree and the 24 whole ones if you mash part of them, though with large marrons you may fall short of a full cup of puree and need a second can.
- Canned mushroomsTwelve canned button mushrooms is roughly a drained 4 oz can. Fresh mushrooms work if you chop and cook them until their liquid has gone, or the stuffing will be wet.
- Onion juiceIn the duck stuffing this means juice pressed from a grated onion through a sieve. A few drops is genuinely a few drops; grated onion pulp itself will do at about half a teaspoon.
- Cool before stuffingThe goose stuffing says to cool the mixture, and the same applies to the others if they are not going into the oven at once. Warm stuffing sitting in a raw bird is the classic way to hold food in the range bacteria like best.
- YieldThe potato quantity should fill a 4 to 5 lb chicken or duck with a little over. The chestnut mixture is on the small side for a goose and will suit one of about 8 to 10 lb; the peanut stuffing comes to roughly a cup and a half, about right for one duck.
History: Potato stuffings sit at the thrifty end of the table, where cooked potato stretched a small measure of bread crumbs and a scrap of salt pork carried fat and seasoning; similar mixtures were long familiar in German and Irish as well as American kitchens. The three recipes here show how stuffing was matched to the bird: chestnuts and sausage for the rich, fatty goose, a pairing generally traced to European practice and well established in English and American cookery by 1900; peanuts and cream for duck, which reads as an American flourish from the decades when the peanut was becoming a respectable cooking ingredient rather than only a snack; and potato for everyday poultry. The call for canned mushrooms and prepared chestnut puree points to a period when commercial canning had brought out-of-season goods within reach of ordinary households.