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Stuffing (Four onions four apples four)
Four onions, four apples, four leaves each of sage and thyme; fry these in two tablespoons of fat till brown; add boiled rice until of a desired stiffness. Season with salt, pepper and cayenne.
A loose formula rather than a measured recipe: it assumes you know how much stuffing your bird needs and will adjust the rice accordingly. A few points make it workable.
- The herb count is unreliableFour sage leaves is a reasonable amount; four thyme leaves is essentially nothing, since a single thyme leaf is a few millimetres long. Read it as four sprigs of thyme, stripped, or about a teaspoon of leaves.
- Rice quantityNothing is stated. Four medium onions and four apples cook down to a few cups of soft mixture; 2 to 3 cups of cooked rice will bring it to a stuffing consistency without burying the fruit. Add it in stages, as the original implies.
- ApplesUse a firm apple that holds its shape when fried, such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy. Peel, core and dice to match the onion.
- "Fat" means dripping"Fat" means whatever dripping was to hand -- in a book of this period that could be goose or duck fat, bacon fat, beef dripping or lard, and it carries much of the flavour. Butter works; a neutral oil leaves the mixture thin-tasting.
- Brown the onions properlyTwo tablespoons of fat and eight cups of chopped onion and apple is a tight fit. Use a wide pan and give the onions a head start of several minutes before the apples go in, or you will steam rather than brown them.
- CayenneIn books of this kind cayenne is generally used with a light hand, as a background heat rather than a chilli note. A quarter teaspoon for this quantity is in keeping.
- Cook it outside the birdIf the stuffing goes into poultry, the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F/74C, which usually means overcooking the breast. Baked separately in a covered dish at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, uncovered for the last ten, it browns better and carries no risk.
- YieldSomething over a quart once the rice is in, enough for a duck or two with some left to bake alongside.
Sage, onion and apple is the classic English stuffing for fatty birds -- goose, duck, and by extension pork -- the fruit and the herb both cutting through the richness. The unusual element here is the rice, standing in for the breadcrumbs or soaked stale bread that most nineteenth-century English cookbooks specify, though rice stuffings were not unknown earlier. Suggestions have been made that such stuffings reached British and American home cooking through Anglo-Indian channels, and economy no doubt played a part, a pot of boiled rice being cheap and easy to hand. A bride's cookbook, compiled for young women setting up a first kitchen, is a plausible place for such a substitution to be recorded without comment, since these books favour formulas that scale by eye.