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Poultry Stuffing No. 1
3 cups fine bread crumbs 1 1/2 cups hot mashed potatoes 1/2 cup celery, chopped fine 1/4 pound black walnut meats Mix these ingredients together. The mashed potatoes should supply all the necessary liquid. If the potatoes are sufficiently seasoned, the stuffing will need no more.
A dry-mix stuffing built on mashed potato rather than butter and stock, in the manner of Irish and Pennsylvania potato stuffings. It comes together in one bowl, so the whole recipe turns on how well the potatoes are seasoned.
- Season the potatoes, not the stuffingThe recipe gives no salt, pepper or herbs of its own; it assumes the mashed potatoes arrive already seasoned. Taste and correct the potato before the crumbs go in, because once the crumbs absorb it the mixture is hard to judge.
- Black walnutsThese are Juglans nigra, not the English walnut sold as "walnuts." They are stronger, faintly resinous, and cost several times as much; 1/4 lb is about 1 cup of meats. English walnuts or pecans will work but give a much milder result.
- Bread crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" is ambiguous in books of this period, but since the potato is expected to supply all the liquid, soft crumbs rubbed from day-old bread are the safer reading rather than the dry sandy crumbs sold for breading. Dry commercial crumbs will drink far more moisture and turn the mixture pasty.
- MoistureThree cups of crumbs to 1 1/2 cups of potato is a stiff mix by modern standards. If it will not hold together loosely when pressed, add stock a tablespoon at a time rather than more potato.
- No fat and no eggPeriod potato stuffings often relied on the bird's own drippings for richness. If you bake it in a dish instead, work in 4-6 tablespoons of melted butter or it will be dry.
- Cook it to temperatureStuffing packed inside a bird must reach 165F at its center, which usually means overcooking the breast. Baking it in a buttered dish for 30-40 minutes at 350F, covered then uncovered to brown, is both safer and better textured.
- YieldThe ingredients sum to roughly 6 cups before mixing, though soft crumbs compress once the potato is worked through; reckon on enough for a 5-6 lb chicken or a side dish for six.
Potato-based stuffings belong to a long thrift tradition in which mashed potato does the work that butter, stock and eggs do in a richer bread dressing, stretching a small quantity of bread and binding it without added liquid. The black walnuts are the American signature: gathered rather than orchard-grown through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hard-shelled and pungent, they appear all through Midwestern and Appalachian cookery in cakes, candies and dressings where an English walnut would vanish. The heading "No. 1" suggests the book carried further numbered stuffings alongside it, though what those variations were cannot be told from this page alone.