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Stuffing
2 cups hot boiled potatoes. 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 tablespoon butter 5 tablespoons cream Yolks of 2 eggs 1/2 tablespoon onion juice 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon black pepper Mash the potatoes; mix thoroughly with the other ingredients and use. Be sure that the potatoes are well drained and mealy, or the stuffing will be soggy.
A rich mashed-potato stuffing, bound with egg yolk and cream rather than bread. The whole thing turns on the texture of the potatoes.
- Potato quantityThe list as printed opens mid-way and does not state how much potato to use; the amount is simply missing from the page. Any figure is guesswork, though the butter, cream and yolks given here would suit somewhere in the region of 1 to 2 lb of potatoes.
- Mealy, not waxyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Use a floury baking potato "russet or similar" and let it steam dry in the hot pan for a minute after draining. Waxy potatoes hold water and the stuffing will slump.
- Do not overworkMash by ricer or masher, never a food processor. Beaten mashed potato turns gluey, and with cream and yolk added it will set into paste.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate an onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the liquid. Half a tablespoon is about a quarter of a medium onion.
- Egg yolksThey bind and enrich. Mix them in while the potato is warm but not hot, so they thicken rather than scramble on contact.
- Cooking itFive tablespoons of cream is a soft, spoonable stuffing. If you bake it in a dish alongside the bird rather than inside it, allow 30-40 minutes at 375F, and take any stuffing cooked inside poultry to 165F.
- YieldBecause the potato quantity is missing, yield cannot be read off the page. On the assumption above it would fill a 4-5 lb chicken or a duck; scale up for a turkey, or serve any surplus as a side dish.
Potato stuffings belong to the goose and duck end of the poultry table, where a starchy, faintly sweet filling stands up to fat birds better than dry breadcrumbs. Versions appear across northern Europe and were carried into American cookery, often enriched, as here, with cream and egg yolk in the manner of a French pommes duchesse. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format suited a household that expected several stuffings on file and chose one to match the bird, and her single warning about mealy, well-drained potatoes is the kind of instruction that only comes from having seen the alternative.