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Salt and Pepper
Powdered sage, summer savory, or marjoram Melt butter in water, and pour over crackers, to which seasonings have been added.
This is the tail end of a cracker stuffing for poultry — the ingredient list has been cut off, leaving only the herbs and the method. The technique is sound and worth knowing, but the proportions have to be reconstructed.
- What is missingThe page as printed gives no quantities for crackers, butter, water, salt or pepper. A workable modern proportion is roughly 2 cups of coarse cracker crumbs, 1/3 to 1/2 cup of butter, and about the same volume of boiling water as butter; treat that as a reconstruction, not as the book's own figure.
- The crackers"Crackers" here most likely means the hard, dry, barely salted common cracker of the period, split and rolled or broken coarse. Unsalted saltines, oyster crackers or plain water biscuits stand in; skip anything buttery or seasoned, since the butter and salt are added deliberately.
- Butter in water, not butter aloneThe butter is melted in the water rather than poured on neat, which helps it spread through the crumbs instead of soaking them in patches. Pour it over the crumbs hot and toss lightly with a fork; pressing or stirring hard tends to give a pasty stuffing rather than a light one. The book does not specify the water's temperature.
- Summer savoryA herb long associated with poultry dressing in New England and the Maritimes, sharper and more peppery than thyme. Dried summer savory is still sold; dried thyme with a pinch of dried mint is the nearest substitute if you cannot find it.
- Seasoning by handPowdered sage of the period was finely ground and strong. Start with about a teaspoon of dried herb per 2 cups of crumbs and taste the mixture before it goes near the bird — this is one of the few stuffings you can safely sample uncooked.
- Cooking itCurrent food-safety guidance is to bake stuffing in a buttered dish rather than packed into the cavity, since the centre of a stuffed bird rarely reaches 165F before the breast overcooks. Baked separately at 350F, covered, for about 30 minutes, it stays moist and browns on top if uncovered for the last 10.
- YieldThe reconstructed quantity above fills a 4 to 5 lb chicken, or serves four to six as a side dish. Double it for a small turkey.
Cracker stuffing is the New England counterpart to the bread dressing of English cookery, and it depends on the common cracker: a hard, keepable wheat biscuit that households could store long after a loaf would have gone stale. Rolled to crumbs and revived with hot buttered water, it swells into something lighter than bread crumb stuffing. The herbs named here — sage, summer savory, marjoram — are a familiar poultry combination of the period; summer savory in particular was closely bound up with roast fowl in the northeastern states and the Maritimes.