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Oyster Stuffing (Cups stale bread crumbs cup)
3 cups stale bread crumbs ½ cup melted butter Salt and pepper Few drops onion juice 1 pint oysters Mix ingredients in the order given, add oysters, cleaned and drained from their liquor.
Turkey Stuffing (Swedish Style) ½ cup English walnut meats, 2 cups stale bread crumbs 2/3 cup melted butter broken in pieces ½ cup raisins, seeded and cut Salt and pepper in pieces
Two stuffings printed as one block, in the two-column style Fannie Farmer's book used for ingredient lists — the text has been scrambled in transcription, so read the second recipe as 2 cups stale bread crumbs, 2/3 cup melted butter, ½ cup English walnut meats broken in pieces, ½ cup raisins seeded and cut, salt and pepper.
- Bread crumbs, 1896 senseThese are soft crumbs from the interior of a day-old loaf, torn or rubbed by hand, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dry commercial crumbs will absorb the butter and set into paste.
- A pint of oystersAbout 1 lb of shucked oysters, roughly 16 to 24 depending on size, sold in tubs with their liquor. The recipe says to drain them; if the crumbs seem dry, a few spoonfuls of the reserved liquor will moisten them, since apart from the melted butter there is no added liquid.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. It gives flavour without any pieces; a teaspoon of very finely grated onion is the practical equivalent.
- The butter is not a misprintHalf a cup to three cups of crumbs is period-correct richness and is what holds the dressing together. It can be cut to a third of a cup without the stuffing falling apart.
- Oysters and timingOysters toughen fast. Fold them in whole at the last moment and do not chop them; they will finish cooking in the residual heat of the dressing and go rubbery if given a long head start in a hot pan.
- Cooking itStuffing cooked inside a bird must reach 165F at the centre, which usually means overcooking the breast. Baking it in a buttered dish at 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, covered for the first 20, is more reliable and gives a better crust.
- YieldThree cups of crumbs makes enough for a 4 to 5 lb roasting chicken. A 14 lb turkey wants roughly three times the quantity.
- The Swedish stuffingNo oysters in that one — it is a sweet-savoury bread dressing of walnuts and raisins, suited to goose or a small turkey. Toast the walnuts briefly first; the book assumes them raw.
The oyster version is a straightforwardly New England thing: shucked oysters were cheap, plentiful and sold by the pint through the winter months on the Atlantic seaboard, which is exactly when roast fowl came to the table. Oyster stuffing is generally traced to that coastal abundance rather than to any single cook, and it appears in American cookbooks well before this one. The "Swedish Style" turkey stuffing reflects a different habit — the raisin-and-nut dressings of northern Europe — and setting the two side by side gives the household a plain version and a company version at once. Note also that the page carries no cooking directions: a reader was expected to know that a stuffing went into the bird and that the bird went into the oven.