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Stuffing for Roast Chicken
2 cups soft bread crumbs 1/4 cup melted butter 1 tablespoon poultry seasoning hot water few drops onion juice salt and pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Mix ingredients in order given. If a moist stuffing is desired, add hot water until of the right consistency; but many prefer a dry stuffing. For a stronger flavor of onion, cook one tablespoon chopped onion in butter and add to crumbs.
A plain New England bread stuffing, given as a formula rather than a set of measurements. The only real decisions are how much liquid to add and how heavily to season.
- Soft bread crumbsThese are torn or rubbed from the interior of a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Two cups of soft crumbs is roughly three slices of bread; packaged dry crumbs will absorb far more butter and water and turn to paste.
- Poultry seasoningA commercial blend, then as now, of sage with thyme, marjoram and often savory. A full tablespoon to two cups of crumbs is assertive by current taste; half that gives a stuffing that still reads as sage-scented without dominating the bird.
- Onion juiceA long-standing cookbook shortcut, still common in this period: a halved onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth, giving flavor without visible pieces. The recipe asks only for a few drops; a little grated onion pulp, or the cooked chopped onion offered as a variant, does much the same work.
- Hot waterAdded a tablespoon at a time. The crumbs should clump when squeezed and fall apart again when released; past that point the stuffing steams into a pudding. The book is right that a drier mix is a matter of preference, not error.
- ButterA quarter cup to two cups of crumbs is generous and does most of the binding. There is no egg here, so the stuffing will be loose and crumbly rather than sliceable.
- Cooking it safelyIf packed into the bird, stuffing must reach 165F at the center of the cavity, which usually means overcooking the breast. Baking it in a covered dish at 350F for about 30 minutes, uncovered for the last 10, avoids the problem entirely.
- YieldTwo cups of crumbs makes enough for a 3 to 4 lb roasting chicken. Double it for a large roaster or a small turkey.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and, as trade cookbooks of the period often did, it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full general kitchen manual. This stuffing is the standard American bread dressing of the era, built on the assumption that every household had stale bread and a tin of commercial poultry seasoning on the shelf; blended poultry seasonings had been sold by American spice houses since the late nineteenth century and made sage-based dressing a matter of one measured spoonful rather than a handful of separate herbs. The onion juice might be read as the tell of a genteel cookery tradition, of the sort often associated with the Boston Cooking School, in which strong flavors were expected to be present but not conspicuous.