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Stuffing for Roast Capon
Three cups of grated, stale bakers' bread; three tablespoons of butter broken into bits; two teaspoons of salt; one-half teaspoon of powdered thyme; one teaspoon of minced parsley and one-half cup of mushrooms chopped fine. STUFFING FOR ROAST GOOSE AND DUCK (American) - Three pints of bread crumbs; six ounces of butter (or part butter and part salt pork); one teaspoon each of sage, black pepper and salt, and one chopped onion.
STUFFING FOR ROAST GOOSE (English) - Ingredients:
Four onions, ten sage leaves, one-quarter pound of bread crumbs, one egg, one and one-half tablespoons of butter, salt and pepper to taste. As may be supposed, this recipe makes a highly seasoned stuffing.
STUFFING FOR TURKEY OR CHICKEN, No. I-Ingredients:
Three cups of grated stale bread, two tablespoons of butter, one tablespoon of chopped parsley, two teaspoons of salt, one-half teaspoon of pepper, one teaspoon of chopped onion. Rub the butter into the crumbs, and let them stand at least an hour, when the rest of the seasoning may be added. This makes a crumbly stuffing.
STUFFING FOR TURKEY OR CHICKEN, No. 2-Ingredients:
One quart of grated bread, one cup of milk, one teaspoon of chopped parsley, one teaspoon of chopped onion, one-half teaspoon of summer savory, one tablespoon of salt, three tablespoons of butter, two eggs, one-half teaspoon of pepper, one-half teaspoon of thyme. Pour the milk on the crumbs, and cover tightly for an hour; then add the rest of the ingredients, omitting the onion if objectionable.
Five stuffings in one entry, all built on the same nineteenth-century assumption: dry, close-grained bakers' bread grated to crumbs, enriched with butter, and seasoned hard. The proportions still work, but the bread and the salt need adjusting.
- Grated stale breadThis means a firm, dry loaf rubbed on a grater into coarse crumbs, not the soft pillowy crumb of modern sandwich bread. Use a day-old sturdy white loaf, torn or pulsed into crumbs and left uncovered overnight; soft fresh bread will turn to paste, particularly in No. 2 where milk is added.
- The salt is highA tablespoon of salt to a quart of crumbs in No. 2, and two teaspoons to three cups in the capon and No. 1 mixtures. Start with half that and taste the mixture before it goes near the bird.
- CaponA capon is a castrated young cockerel, fatter and more tender than a roasting hen, and now mostly a specialist-butcher item. The recipes give no yields; as a rough guide, three cups of crumbs suits a 5-6 lb roasting chicken and the three-pint goose mixture a 10-12 lb bird.
- Sage leaves, not ground sageThe English goose stuffing counts ten fresh leaves; ground dried sage is far stronger, so roughly a teaspoon stands in. The note that it is "highly seasoned" is honest -- four onions to a quarter pound of crumbs is mostly onion, and it is meant to cut goose fat.
- Onions want softeningNone of these versions cooks the onion first. If you are roasting to modern doneness, sweat the chopped onion in a little of the butter first or it will stay raw and sharp.
- The resting hour mattersRubbing butter into the crumbs and letting them stand, or pouring milk over and covering tightly, is what gives each version its texture -- crumbly in No. 1, moist and almost bound in No. 2. Skipping it produces a uniformly damp mass either way.
- Cooked inside the birdStuffing packed into a cavity has to reach 165F at the centre, which on a large goose or turkey often means overcooking the breast to get there. Pack loosely, check with a thermometer, or bake the stuffing in a buttered dish with some of the pan drippings.
- Salt pork optionWhere the American goose stuffing offers part butter and part salt pork, use finely diced fatty salt pork rendered gently, and drop the added salt accordingly.
The grouping here is telling: five stuffings distinguished not by cleverness but by bird, with sage and onion reserved for goose and duck because the herb's resinous bitterness is the traditional counter to very fatty poultry -- a pairing that already appears in eighteenth-century English cookery books. The distinction the book draws between an "American" and an "English" goose stuffing is mostly a matter of bulk: the American version is bread with seasoning, the English one is onion held together by a little bread, closer to the sage-and-onion mixture later sold ready-made in Britain. Summer savory in the second turkey stuffing is the ingredient that has quietly dropped out of most modern spice racks, though it was a standard kitchen-garden herb in nineteenth-century America and remains common in Atlantic Canadian dressing to this day.