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Poultry Stuffing
One quart stale bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and powdered thyme to season highly, one-half cup melted butter substitute.
A bare-bones bread stuffing of the sort that assumes the cook already knows what a stuffed bird looks like. The few things it leaves unsaid are worth spelling out.
- Butter substituteIn books of this period this usually means oleomargarine, or else rendered poultry fat, drippings or lard. Any of these works; plain butter is the obvious modern choice, and the substitution was most likely a matter of cost or wartime shortage.
- A quart of crumbsFour cups by volume, which for torn stale bread is roughly 6 to 8 ounces, or about half a one-pound loaf. Crumbs here means bread pulled or cut into rough pieces, not the fine dry sand sold in canisters, which would turn to paste.
- Stale is not optionalFresh bread collapses once the fat and the bird's juices reach it. Day-old bread left uncovered overnight, or cubes dried in a 300F oven for 15 minutes, keeps its structure.
- No liquid, by designNo added liquid, by design -- There is no stock or egg in this mixture; the half cup of melted fat is the only moisture. It is meant to go into the cavity fairly dry and to take up the fat and juices from the bird as it roasts. Baked in a dish on its own it will be dry; add about a cup of stock in that case.
- Season highlyThe instruction is deliberate. Bread mutes salt and herbs, and the mixture should taste slightly too strong on its own. Start with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of dried thyme for the quart and adjust upward.
- YieldRoughly enough to fill a 4 to 5 lb roasting chicken. A 12 lb turkey will want two to three times as much, and pack it loosely so heat can penetrate.
- DonenessStuffing inside a bird lags well behind the breast meat. Check the center of the stuffing with an instant-read thermometer and take the bird from the oven only when it reads 165F, or bake the stuffing separately.
The phrase butter substitute points to the early twentieth century. Household cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s were written into a period of growing margarine use and, around the First World War, of government campaigns urging households to conserve butter, sugar and wheat. The stuffing itself is a plain bread forcemeat in the English manner: crumbs, fat, salt, pepper and one dominant herb -- here thyme, though sage and onion is the more familiar Anglo-American pairing. What is notable is the absence of egg, onion, celery and stock.