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Stuffing (Cupfuls Cooked Oats cold)
2 Cupfuls Cooked Oats (cold) 2 Cupfuls Dry Crumbs (Cornmeal, Bread Crumbs especially good) 1 Tablespoonful Minced Onion 1 Teaspoon Salt 1/2 Teaspoon Pepper 1 Tablespoon Sage 1/2 Tablespoon Savory 1/2 Cupful Fat Mix well and use for stuffing.
A frugal oatmeal-and-crumb stuffing of the sort built around yesterday's breakfast porridge. It comes with no yield, no cooking method and a very heavy hand with the dried herbs, all of which want adjusting.
- What "cooked oats" meansPlain cooked oatmeal porridge, made with water and salt and left to go cold and firm. Rolled oats are fine; steel-cut give a better texture and less paste. Break the cold mass up with a fork before mixing so it distributes rather than sitting in lumps.
- The herbs are dried, and there are a lot of themA tablespoon of sage plus half a tablespoon of savory in four cups of base is aggressive by current taste. Start with a teaspoon of each and adjust; ground sage in particular turns bitter and medicinal in quantity.
- "1/2 Cupful Fat"Butter, drippings or rendered poultry fat, melted before it goes in. Butter is the safe default; if you are stuffing a bird, its own rendered fat or a mix of butter and drippings suits better.
- Dry crumbs, and the moisture problem"Cornmeal" is listed here among the crumbs; it most likely means dry cornbread crumbs, though plain dry meal was also used in mixtures of this kind and will stay grittier. The mixture as written is fairly dry and stiff; add stock, milk or water a few tablespoons at a time until it just holds together when squeezed.
- OnionA single tablespoon minced raw onion is thin flavour for this volume. Soften half a small onion in some of the fat first, which both increases the yield of flavour and removes the raw bite.
- YieldAbout four to five cups loosely packed, enough for a 4-5 lb chicken with some left over, or roughly half what a 14 lb turkey will take.
- Cook it outside the birdOat-based stuffing is dense and slow to heat through. Bake it in a buttered dish at 350F for 35-45 minutes, covered for the first half, uncovered after to crisp the top. If you do stuff a bird, the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F, which usually means overcooking the breast.
Oatmeal in a stuffing is a Scottish and northern English habit before it is an American one — skirlie, oatmeal fried with onion and dripping, has long been served both as a side dish and as a filling for poultry, and mealie pudding works on the same principle of oats, fat, onion and pepper. Its appearance in an American recipe collection of the period, sitting beside bread-crumb stuffings, reflects two pressures of the time: oats were being pushed hard by millers as a cheap breakfast staple, and household economy manuals treated leftover cooked cereal as a resource rather than a scrap. Recipes of this kind, telling a new cook to fold cold porridge into crumbs and herbs, were the practical face of that thrift. Sage and savory is one of the herb pairings used in English poultry seasoning, savory being one of several herbs that may join the sage.