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Celery Stuffing for Boiled Turkey
Take one-half head of celery, one quart of bread crumbs, two eggs, two tablespoons of salt, two tablespoons of butter, one-half teaspoon of pepper. Chop the celery fine, and add the other ingredients after rubbing the butter into the crumbs.
A plain forcemeat of the sort meant to be packed into a bird and cooked with it. Two things in the original need adjusting before you make it: the salt and the crumb.
- The salt is out of proportionTwo tablespoons of salt to one quart of crumbs is about three times what a modern palate accepts, and if your butter is salted the total goes higher still. Two teaspoons is a sane starting point; season and taste before the eggs go in.
- "Bread crumbs" means soft crumbsIn this period the phrase meant day-old bread rubbed or torn into crumb, not the dry, sandy packaged kind. A quart of soft crumbs is about 4 oz of bread, which is four or five average slices with the crusts left on.
- Half a head of celeryCelery of the period was often blanched pale and heads ran smaller than a modern bunch. Use four or five ribs from a modern bunch, finely chopped, with a handful of the tender inner leaves, which are strongly flavoured.
- Rub the butter in firstThe recipe does specify working the butter into the crumbs before the other ingredients are added. Coating the crumbs with fat before the eggs bind them plausibly keeps the mixture looser. Have the butter soft, not melted.
- Two tablespoons of butter is 1 ozThat is a lean stuffing by current standards. If you want it richer, go to 3 or 4 tablespoons; more than that and the mixture will not hold together around the eggs.
- Cooking it in a boiled birdA stuffing enclosed in a simmering turkey heats slowly and unevenly. Whether inside the bird or in a separate dish, it contains raw egg and needs to reach 165F at the centre; check with a thermometer rather than by time.
- YieldA little over a quart of stuffing, enough to fill a bird of around 8 lb generously or a larger one lightly, or six to eight servings baked separately in a buttered dish.
Boiled turkey sounds strange now but was a recognised dish in American and English households into the early twentieth century: a large bird gently simmered, often wrapped in cloth, and sent to table under a white sauce or oyster sauce rather than browned. American celery was a prestige crop in this era, grown intensively around Kalamazoo, Michigan and elsewhere, sold in tall glass vases on the dinner table and treated as a delicacy in its own right, so a celery forcemeat read as generous rather than plain. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book to a middle-class housekeeping audience.