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Bread Stuffing-No. 2
17/½ cups bread-crums
1 teaspoon powdered sage
3 tablespoons butter or other
1 teaspoon salt fat
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon chopped onion
Rub the fat into the crums, then add the seasonings.
A dry, uncooked stuffing mixture in the plainest possible style: seasoned crumbs bound with nothing but softened fat. The quantities suit a single fish or a small bird.
- Quantity of crumbsThe crumb measure has been mangled in printing and reads as "17/½ cups"; the likeliest intended reading is 1½ cups. The seasonings give no firm check on this, so treat any reconstruction as a guess, and note that 1½ cups is a small amount for a whole bird.
- Bread-crumbsStuffing crumbs of this period were often soft crumbs from stale bread, torn or rubbed by hand, rather than the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters, though this recipe does not specify. Day-old white bread pulled into rough pieces gives a plausible texture.
- Rub the fat inThe fat should be soft, not melted, and worked through the crumbs with the fingertips as for pastry. Melted butter poured over collapses the crumbs into paste; rubbed in, it coats them and they stay separate when cooked.
- Powdered sageA full teaspoon of powdered sage is assertive by current taste. Start with half and add more once you have tasted the mixture.
- Raw onionThe tablespoon of chopped onion goes in raw and will only partly soften inside a fish or a small bird. Mince it very fine, or sweat it in the fat first if you dislike a raw onion edge.
- MoistureNothing binds this beyond the fat, so it stays loose and crumbly. If you want it to hold together for slicing, a beaten egg or a few spoonfuls of stock is the usual period addition, but the mixture as written is meant to be dry.
- Cooking and safetyStuffing packed into poultry must reach 165F at the centre of the cavity, which usually means the bird runs past that at the thigh. Baking the stuffing separately in a dish avoids the problem entirely.
- YieldThe yield cannot be fixed, since the crumb measure is garbled. If 1½ cups of crumbs was intended, the result is a small quantity -- enough for one fish or a few chops rather than a whole bird.
Butterick, the pattern company, also published cook books, and the stuffing section reads like a reference table rather than a set of dishes: a numbered run of variations built on the same crumb-and-fat foundation, so a cook could pick one to suit whatever was going in the oven. The plainness is the point. Bread, sage and onion is a long-established English stuffing formula, appearing in cookery books well before 1800 and still in use in the twentieth century, largely because it costs almost nothing and uses up bread that would otherwise be wasted. The phrase "butter or other fat" acknowledges that households cooked with lard, drippings or vegetable shortenings, and that the recipe should not presume otherwise.