Home › Meats › Poultry Dressing
Poultry Dressing
2 cups stale bread 1 tablespoon finely cut onion 1 tablespoon drippings 1 tablespoon finely cut parsley 1/2 tablespoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/4 teaspoon paprika powdered sage if desired Soak bread in cold water 5 minutes and press out all water. Put drippings and onion into pan and cook slowly, stirring constantly, until onion is tender but not brown. Add bread, parsley, salt, pepper, paprika and powdered sage; mix well and cook thoroughly.
A plain bread dressing of the sort every American cookbook carried in the early twentieth century. The technique that distinguishes it — soaking the bread and wringing it dry — is the part worth getting right.
- Soak and squeezeThe bread is wetted and then pressed hard enough to leave it barely damp, which gives a dense, close-textured dressing rather than a fluffy one. Use genuinely stale, firm white bread; fresh supermarket sandwich bread turns to paste under this treatment. The recipe does not say what form the bread takes; if it is torn or cubed slices, two cups is on the order of 2 to 3 ounces.
- DrippingsPoultry, bacon or beef fat saved from earlier cooking. Butter works and gives a cleaner flavour; one tablespoon is a lean amount by modern taste, and two or three will not hurt.
- SaltHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons for a small quantity of bread. That is assertive by current standards, and worth halving at first and correcting at the end.
- Powdered sagePowdered sage is potent. Start with 1/4 teaspoon for this quantity and taste; ground sage from a fresh jar can dominate everything else.
- "Cook thoroughly"On the stovetop over low heat, stirring, for about five minutes — long enough to drive off the soaking water and marry the seasonings. The mixture should hold together and smell of cooked onion, not raw.
- YieldA small quantity: enough to stuff a small chicken, or to fill a small buttered dish and bake alongside a larger bird. The recipe gives no oven and no baking time, so any figure is a modern suggestion — 350F for 25 to 30 minutes will brown the top.
- If you stuff the birdCool the dressing before filling, fill loosely, and take the temperature at the centre of the stuffing as well as at the thigh; both need to reach 165F. Dressing packed tight into a hot cavity is the classic reason a bird reads done while its centre does not.
"Dressing" and "stuffing" have meant the same thing in American kitchens for well over a century, with dressing the more common term in the South and in genteel print — the older sense of the verb, to dress a fowl, covers all the preparing done to a bird before it goes to the fire. A bread base bound by nothing but its own soaked crumb, seasoned with onion, parsley and sage, was the default everywhere; regional versions swapped in cornmeal, oysters, chestnuts or sausage as the local larder allowed. Sage's long marriage to poultry and pork is traditional rather than documented in any single source, but it is old, and English cookbooks were pairing the two well before American ones existed. The Royal books were promotional cookery published by a baking powder manufacturer.