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Sausage Stuffing
½ pound sausage-meat
1 tablespoon onion-juice
2 cups dried bread-crums
1 tablespoon minced parsley
Salt and pepper
Mix sausage and crums, then add seasonings.
A four-line stuffing that depends entirely on the sausage for fat, salt and moisture. The proportions are sound, but two of the ingredients mean something different now than they did in 1911.
- Sausage-meatThis means bulk pork sausage sold loose, not links and not a cured product. Period sausage-meat was usually seasoned simply, often with salt, pepper and sage, while many modern breakfast sausages are sweeter and more heavily spiced, so taste before adding any salt of your own.
- Onion-juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze grated onion in a cloth. A tablespoon of juice takes roughly half a medium onion. Grated pulp will do if you do not want to strain it.
- Dried bread-crumbsIn 1911 this generally meant crumbs made from bread dried out in the oven, which could be fine or fairly coarse; avoid the sandy canister crumbs, which will pack into paste. Stale bread torn or cut into rough half-inch pieces and dried in a low oven until crisp but not browned works well. Two cups is roughly two to three slices.
- No added liquid or butterThe recipe looks dry because the sausage renders as it cooks and the crumbs absorb the fat. Do not add stock or melted butter at the mixing stage unless the sausage is very lean, in which case a few tablespoons of stock is enough.
- Break the sausage up coldWork the meat into the crumbs with your fingertips while it is still fridge-cold so it stays in small nuggets. Overworking it warm makes the fat smear and the finished stuffing turn dense and springy.
- Temperature, not timeBecause the pork goes in raw, the centre of the stuffing has to reach 165F, and inside a bird that lags well behind the breast meat. Check the stuffing with a thermometer rather than trusting the poultry timing, or bake it in a separate dish for 35 to 40 minutes at 350F.
- YieldAbout three cups, enough for a 4 to 5 lb chicken, a small duck, or a pork loin cut with a pocket. Double it for a turkey.
Butterick's stuffing chapter reflects a period when a stuffing was understood as a way of stretching an expensive centrepiece rather than a dish in its own right, and sausage-meat did the stretching cheaply while contributing the fat that lean bread crumbs lack. Onion-juice appears constantly in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, a fashion for onion flavour without visible onion. The pairing of pork sausage with bread is often said to derive from English farmhouse practice, where the pig and the stale loaf were both household staples, though the lineage is folk tradition rather than documented. Note too that the book assumes the reader knows how much salt and pepper to use, a habit of brevity common to household manuals written for cooks who had learned by watching rather than by measuring.