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Potato Stuffing
2 cups hot mashed potato 1¼ cups soft stale bread crumbs 1/4 cup finely chopped fat salt pork 1 finely chopped onion 1/3 cup butter 1 egg ½ teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon sage Add to potato, bread crumbs, butter, egg, salt, and sage; then add pork and onion.
Goose Stuffing (Chestnut) 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped 1 cup chestnut purée shallot 1/3 cup stale bread crumbs 3 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoon finely chopped ¼ lb. sausage meat parsley 12 canned mushrooms, finely 24 French chestnuts cooked chopped and left whole Salt and pepper Cook shallot with butter five minutes, add sausage meat, and cook two minutes, then add mushrooms, chestnut purée, ROAST TURKEY GARNISHED FOR SERVING. - Page 254.
DUCK STUFFED AND TRUSSED FOR ROASTING. - Page 257.
STUFFED EGG PLANT. - Page 293.
PURÉE OF SPINACH. - Page 300. parsley, and salt and pepper. Heat to boiling-point, add bread crumbs and whole chestnuts. Cool mixture before stuffing goose.
A goose-and-duck stuffing from the era when the potato was the standard binder for rich, fatty birds. Two separate stuffings run together in this text; the notes below cover both.
- The quantities as printedThe bread crumbs for the potato stuffing are 1 1/4 cups, and the sausage meat in the chestnut stuffing is 1/4 lb. Read the run-together figures accordingly.
- Salt porkUse unsmoked fat salt pork or fatback, rinsed of surface salt and chopped very fine so it renders inside the bird. If you can only find bacon, blanch it a minute to knock back the smoke and cure, and cut the added salt to 1 teaspoon.
- SageA teaspoon here most likely means dried sage rather than fresh. Rubbed sage is fluffier and less potent than powdered, so use closer to two teaspoons; fresh sage, finely chopped, needs about a tablespoon.
- Mashed potatoIt must go in hot and dry, not wet and gluey. Boil or steam floury potatoes, drain thoroughly, and mash without milk or cream, since the butter and egg supply all the moisture the mixture wants.
- Temperature, not timeWhatever the bird, the centre of the stuffing has to reach 165F. Potato is dense and heats slowly, so pack it loosely and check with a thermometer; if the bird is done before the stuffing, finish the stuffing in a buttered dish.
- Chestnut pur ed stuffing: French chestnuts"French chestnuts" are the large sweet European chestnut, Castanea sativa. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are the modern equivalent, and unsweetened chestnut pur ee sells in tins alongside them; avoid the sweetened cr eme de marrons.
- Canned mushroomsTwelve small canned button mushrooms come to somewhere between half a cup and a cup once chopped. Fresh mushrooms sauteed in a little of the butter until their liquid has cooked away give a better result.
- Cool before stuffingThe chestnut mixture is heated to boiling, so it must be cooled to room temperature before it goes into the goose. Warm stuffing sitting in a raw bird is exactly the window bacteria want.
- YieldThe potato stuffing makes roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups, about enough for a duck or a small goose; double it for a large goose or turkey.
Potato stuffing belongs to the Pennsylvania German and northern European tradition of packing fatty birds with something starchy enough to absorb the drippings, and Fannie Farmer files it among the poultry stuffings for goose and duck rather than turkey, where bread and oyster dressings held the field. The chestnut stuffing beside it points the other way, toward the French kitchen that dominated formal American menus around 1900: shallot, sausage meat, mushrooms and chestnut pur ee, with whole chestnuts folded in at the end so they stay visible on the plate. Chestnuts were a genuine autumn staple then; American chestnut trees still stood in quantity, though the imported European nuts are often said to have been preferred for their size, and the blight that would strip the eastern forests was only just beginning its spread from New York.