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Dressing for Stuffing Chickens
1 1/2 cups stale bread crumbs 1/3 cup butter Salt Chopped onions Herbs Pepper Mix the ingredients, season to taste and moisten. Fill both openings of bird, each about half full and either truss or use skewers to hold the chicken in shape. Boiled chestnuts can be added to the dressing, in which case omit all seasoning but the salt and pepper. Celery and parsley also improve the flavor.
A plain bread dressing with the proportions given but the seasonings left entirely to the cook. A few of the vaguer directions are worth pinning down before you start.
- Crumbs, not crumbs"Stale bread crumbs" in books of this period usually means day-old bread torn or rubbed into coarse pieces rather than fine dry crumbs, though usage varies. Roughly 2 1/2 to 3 oz of stale white bread, torn small; packaged fine crumbs will pack into paste.
- "Moisten" with whatThe original does not name the liquid. Stock, milk or hot water all work; add it a spoonful at a time until the crumbs hold together when pressed but are not wet, roughly 1/4 cup.
- Quantity and yieldOne and a half cups of crumbs makes enough for a 3 to 4 lb bird, filling body and neck cavities half full as directed. Double it for a 5 to 6 lb roaster.
- Half full is deliberateBread dressing swells as it absorbs juices. Packing the cavity tight gives you a dense, gummy centre and slows heat penetration; the half-full instruction is the most useful line in the recipe.
- Butter1/3 cup is about 5 tablespoons. Melt it and pour it over the crumbs, or soften and rub it in; either way the fat should coat the bread before the liquid goes in.
- Onion and herbsNo amounts are given. For this quantity, 1 small onion finely chopped and softened in a little of the butter, plus 1 to 2 teaspoons total of chopped sage, thyme or parsley. Raw onion left raw in the mix will still be sharp when the bird is done.
- DonenessStuffed birds need the centre of the dressing to reach 165F, not just the thigh. Check both, and expect a stuffed chicken to take 20 to 30 minutes longer than an empty one; baking the dressing separately in a buttered dish for 30 to 40 minutes at 350F avoids the problem entirely.
- The chestnut versionBoiled chestnuts, peeled and roughly broken, are added to the dressing; the recipe gives no proportion. The instruction to drop all seasoning but salt and pepper suits the chestnuts, whose flavour is easily buried by sage and onion.
Bread, butter, onion and herbs is often said to be the plainest and among the oldest of the English-American poultry dressings, and by the early twentieth century it was the baseline against which cooks measured the richer versions built on oysters, sausage meat or chopped giblets. The chestnut variation points to economy from the other direction — chestnuts were cheap and abundant in autumn markets in the eastern United States before the chestnut blight, first noticed in New York in the first decade of the 1900s, destroyed the native stands and turned them into an imported luxury.