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Stuffing (Cup hot riced potatoes)
1 cup hot riced potatoes 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/4 teaspoon marjoram or summer savory Few drops union juice 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 cup soft stale bread crumbs soaked in some of the celery water and wrung in cheese-cloth Yolk 1 egg Mix ingredients in order given WAYS OF WARMING OVER POULTRY AND GAME
A small, rich potato stuffing of the sort meant for a single bird or a pair of small ones rather than a large turkey. It comes together in minutes once the potatoes are riced.
- Rice the potatoes hotThe recipe specifies hot riced potatoes. Cooled potato is harder to work smoothly with butter and egg yolk, and overworking it can turn the mixture gluey. Press the potatoes through the ricer straight from the pot and mix at once.
- Onion juiceThe text as printed reads "union juice", evidently onion juice. Grate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a square of cloth. "A few drops" is a very small quantity -- an eighth of a teaspoon or less -- and it flavours with little added moisture or texture.
- Celery waterThe cooking liquid from boiled celery. The recipe refers to "the celery water" without saying where it comes from, so it presumably belongs to another recipe elsewhere in the book. Any light stock, or water simmered a few minutes with celery trimmings, does the same job.
- Wringing the crumbsSoaking then squeezing the bread in cheesecloth is what keeps the stuffing from going wet. Wring hard enough that the crumbs hold together in a damp ball rather than dripping.
- Marjoram or summer savoryBoth were standard poultry herbs in this period. Use dried at the quarter teaspoon given, or roughly three times that if fresh.
- The egg yolkThe yolk is the binder and it needs to reach a safe temperature. Cook the stuffing through, either inside the bird until the centre of the stuffing registers 165F, or spooned into a buttered dish and baked at 350F for about 25 minutes.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of stuffing, enough for one small chicken or a pair of game birds.
Potato stuffings belong to a family of cheaper, more filling dressings found in American and British household cookery, standing in for bread-and-suet mixtures where potatoes were plentiful and bread was not to be spared. The potato ricer, a press that forces cooked potato through small holes, was in kitchen use by the later nineteenth century and is what keeps a stuffing like this light rather than pasty; the small quantity of soaked bread crumbs here appears to be doing structural work, holding the potato open so it does not compact inside the bird. Onion juice rather than chopped onion turns up often in cooking-school books of this kind, as does the pairing of marjoram and summer savory for poultry.