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Bread Stuffing-No. 1
1½ cups bread-crums
½ cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon chopped onion
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon butter
Add the seasonings and butter to the crums and beat in the milk last.
A plain bread stuffing of the sort a 1900s cook expected to scale up or down without being told. The proportions are the useful part; almost everything else needs a decision made for you.
- What "bread-crums" means hereProbably not the dry, sandy commercial crumbs: a recipe that beats in half a cup of milk suggests soft crumbs rubbed or torn from bread, loosely measured. Dry packaged crumbs will absorb the milk instantly and set into paste; if that is all you have, use about half as much by weight and add milk until the mix just clumps.
- YieldAbout 1½ cups made up, enough for a small fish or bird. For a 12 lb turkey you would want roughly six times this.
- The onion is rawA tablespoon of raw chopped onion in a small quantity of stuffing reads sharp and watery. Sweating it in the tablespoon of butter first, then adding both to the crumbs, costs three minutes.
- ButterSoften or melt it. Cold butter cut into soft crumbs will stay in lumps, since there is no heat step before the stuffing goes into the bird or fish.
- MoistureHalf a cup of milk to 1½ cups of soft crumbs gives a loose, spoonable stuffing that will absorb fat and juices as it cooks. If you plan to bake it separately in a dish it needs more liquid, or an egg, or it will dry out with nothing around it.
- Temperature, if it goes insideStuffing packed into poultry has to reach 165F at its centre, which usually lags the thigh meat. Pack it loosely and check it with a thermometer rather than trusting the bird's timing.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt for this small amount is on the assertive side by modern taste, and bread crumbs and butter may already be salted. Start with half and correct.
Butterick's stuffing chapter belongs to a period when a stuffing was understood as a way of stretching a roast and using up bread rather than as a dish in its own right, which is why it is numbered: No. 1 implies at least one more numbered stuffing follows. Publishers of dress patterns like Butterick moved into household manuals because they already reached the same audience of home-managing women by mail, and the recipes reflect that market -- short, unfussy, assuming a cook who knows how long to roast a fowl and only wants the proportions. The word "stuffing" was still ordinary here; the genteel American preference for "dressing" is often attributed to Victorian squeamishness about the verb, though that story is best treated as folk etymology.