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Celery Stuffing
½ bunch celery
1 quart stale but not dry
2 tablespoons butter or other bread-crums fat
2 tablespoons salt
2 eggs
½ teaspoon pepper
Chop the celery fine. Melt the butter or other fat, add the crums and mix well. Add the celery, salt and pepper and the eggs slightly beaten.
The ingredient list was set in two narrow columns and has come through jumbled, so read it as: 1½ bunches celery, 1 quart stale (not dry) breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons butter or other fat, 2 tablespoons salt, 2 eggs, ½ teaspoon pepper. One of those figures should be treated with suspicion.
- The salt is the problemThe salt looks high -- Two tablespoons of salt to a quart of crumbs is far more than a modern palate expects, and it may well be a misprint for teaspoons. Start with 2 teaspoons, mix, and taste the raw crumb mixture before the eggs go in.
- A quart of crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, loosely packed, run about 4 ounces to the quart — roughly four to five slices. "Stale but not dry" matters: dried-out crumbs drink the egg and turn the stuffing to paste.
- Celery quantityChop the celery finely, stalks and leaves both; the leaves carry much of the flavour here, since apart from salt and pepper nothing else is seasoning the dish.
- Chop fine, and mean itCoarse pieces of celery can stay stringy in the finished stuffing. Cut the stalks lengthwise before slicing across so no fibre runs the full width of a piece.
- Raw celery, on purposeThe celery is not sweated first; it goes in raw with the crumbs. If you want a mellower, sweeter result, cook it in the butter for five minutes before adding the crumbs.
- Fat is light for the volumeTwo tablespoons of butter to a quart of crumbs gives a dry, crumbly stuffing that falls apart on the spoon. Four tablespoons, or a few spoonfuls of stock, gives something that holds together without being heavy.
- TemperatureThe eggs bind but they also mean the stuffing has to reach 165F at its centre, whether it is inside the bird or baked separately in a dish. Mix it and cook it the same day; do not stuff a bird the night before.
- YieldA quart of crumbs makes enough stuffing for a chicken or another small bird; scale up for a turkey. Baked alone in a buttered dish at 350F it takes about 35 minutes, covered for the first 20.
Celery was a luxury vegetable in America well into the nineteenth century — fussy to grow, blanched in trenches, and sold standing upright in tall cut-glass vases as a centrepiece precisely because it was expensive enough to display. By the time Butterick assembled this book, refrigerated rail cars and the muck fields of Michigan and New York had made it a cheap winter staple, and it turns up everywhere in period cookery: in soups, in salads, boiled as a side dish, and here as the sole flavouring in a stuffing. An earlier stuffing would have leaned on sage, summer savory or onion; this one trusts a single vegetable to carry the whole dish, which only makes sense once that vegetable is abundant.