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Bacon Turkey Stuffing
1/2 cup bacon 12 tiny button onions with a clove in each 1/2 cup giblets, cooked 5 cups bread crumbs 4 celery tops (chopped) 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper dash of celery salt 1 teaspoon summer savory 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 2 cups giblets or soup stock 1/2 cup grape juice Brown bacon, remove from pan and chop. To the hot fat add onions and cook until clear, add giblets, bread crumbs and seasonings. Moisten with liquid in which giblets were cooked mixed with grape juice.
A savory bread stuffing built on bacon fat and giblet stock, with grape juice standing in for the wine an older recipe would have used. The ingredient list is complete but the method stops short, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- Put the bacon backThe bacon is browned and chopped but never returned to the bowl. Fold it in with the giblets and crumbs; the fat alone is not what the half cup is for.
- The liquid"2 cups giblets or soup stock" means giblet stock or plain soup stock, not two cups of chopped giblets on top of the half cup already listed. Add it gradually with the grape juice — five cups of dry crumbs will take most but not necessarily all of it.
- Bread crumbsThese are soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for breading. Five cups of packaged dry crumbs would drink the liquid and set like paste.
- Button onionsTwelve pearl or boiling onions, peeled, each stuck with a whole clove. Twelve cloves is assertive; six is plenty for most palates, and pull them out before serving if you would rather not bite one.
- Summer savoryStill sold dried, though poultry seasoning is the common substitute. A teaspoon of dried savory is right; if using fresh, triple it.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of black pepper is a lot for this volume — start with half and adjust once the mixture is moistened and you can taste it.
- Cooking itNo baking direction is given. Baked in a covered buttered dish at 350F it needs about 45 minutes, uncovered for the last 15. If you pack it into the bird, the center of the stuffing must reach 165F, which is the usual reason a stuffed turkey overcooks in the breast.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, enough to stuff a 12-pound turkey or to serve ten to twelve as a side dish.
Grape juice in a savory stuffing suggests a temperance-era substitution. Welch's had long promoted unfermented grape juice as a respectable table alternative to wine, and some cookbooks of the twenties and thirties used it in place of a sweet red wine or port — in gravies, in fruit cups, in poultry dressings like this one. The bacon fat and giblet stock are older practice, the sort of thrift that treated the fat rendered from a half cup of bacon as the seasoning base for a large bowl of crumbs. Summer savory, now a minor herb in American kitchens, was a common poultry herb in parts of the northeastern United States and Atlantic Canada, which may be why it turns up here without further explanation.