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Stuffing for Fowls
Season ground stale bread crumbs with chopped or grated onion, salt and pepper. Add a little melted butter to moisten, or fat from the liquor in which they are cooked. Oysters may be added to make oyster dressing. Soak 1 pint stale bread in 11/2 pints cold water. Cook 1 onion (chopped) in one tablespoon butter. Squeeze out water from crumbs and put in onion and butter. Cook a few minutes and when taken from fire add one egg beaten slightly. Cook onion in tablespoon butter, and fry meal cakes in this. Moisten meal with chicken fat from liquor. Stuff chicken and turkey with corn that has been boiled- cut from cob-seasoned highly with butter, pepper and salt.
This entry gathers several stuffings under one heading -- a plain bread dressing, an oyster version, a soaked-crumb dressing bound with egg, a cornmeal one, and a sweetcorn stuffing. Treat them as separate options rather than a single sequence.
- The hinge: cook the stuffing to temperatureBread and oyster dressings packed inside a bird sit in the coolest part of the cavity. Whatever the bird's own doneness, the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F/74C; the reliable approach is to bake the dressing in a buttered dish alongside and spoon it in after carving.
- Pint of breadBread here is measured by volume, not weight. Depending on how finely the bread is broken, a pint may weigh anything from a couple of ounces (torn pieces) to about half a pound (fine dry crumbs). Either way it absorbs the soaking water and squeezes down to a dense, almost paste-like mass.
- Squeezing the crumbsSoaking then wringing out gives a smooth, cohesive dressing rather than a crumbly one. Wring firmly in a clean cloth or by handfuls -- leftover water makes the egg-bound mixture slack and heavy.
- "Meal" means cornmeal"Meal" -- Most likely cornmeal, though the text does not say so. The meal-cake variant reads as a cornbread-style dressing: the cakes are fried in the onion butter, and the meal moistened with fat from the cooking liquor.
- OystersAdd shucked oysters whole with a little of their liquor, and only at the end. Long cooking shrinks them to rubber; two to three minutes of residual heat, or the last few minutes of baking, is enough.
- The corn stuffingFresh corn cut from the cob is intended, boiled briefly and scraped. Frozen kernels work; drain them well, since excess moisture will make the cavity steam rather than the stuffing set.
- QuantityThe soaked-crumb version as given makes enough for a small chicken. Scale it up several times over for a large turkey, increasing the onion and butter in proportion.
- Fat from the liquor"Fat from the liquor in which they are cooked" means the fat rising off giblet or neck stock. Chill it briefly and it lifts off in a solid cap; it carries far more flavour than plain melted butter.
The frugality shows: stale bread, the water it was soaked in, and skimmed fat from the giblet pot all do work here that butter alone would have done in a richer decade. The regional range is telling too -- oyster dressing is associated with the Atlantic coast and the Chesapeake, where oysters were cheap and shipped inland on ice, while cornmeal and cut-corn stuffings reflect the older Southern and Midwestern practice of building dressing on corn rather than wheat bread.