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Giblet Stuffing for Turkey
Put the giblets in a saucepan over the fire with boiling water to cover; sprinkle over a teaspoonful of salt and a quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper, and boil gently until tender. Save the water in which the giblets were boiled to use for gravy. Chop the giblets quite fine; put them in a fryingpan over the fire with four ounces of butter, two breakfast cupfuls of stale breadcrumbs and a good seasoning of salt, pepper and any powdered sweet herb except sage; stir all these ingredients together until they are of a light brown; add a wineglassful of sherry or Madeira wine, and the forcemeat is ready for use.
A dry, buttery crumb dressing rather than the moist bread stuffing most Americans now expect — closer to a French forcemeat, which is what Oscar calls it in the last line. A few of the measures need translating.
- GibletsThe neck, heart, gizzard and liver from the bird's cavity packet. The heart and gizzard need 45-60 minutes at a bare simmer to become tender; the liver needs about 10 and turns chalky and bitter if boiled with them, so cook it separately or add it at the end.
- Breakfast cupfulBreakfast cups were not standardised, but are usually reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces, i.e. at or a little above a modern measuring cup. Two of them means about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of crumbs, which is why the yield is small.
- WineglassfulAbout 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. Period wineglasses were much smaller than today's.
- Stale breadcrumbsCrumbs torn or grated from day-old white bread, not the fine dried crumbs sold in canisters. Packaged crumbs will absorb the butter and go pasty.
- Four ounces of butterOne stick, for 2 cups of crumbs. That is a rich ratio by design — the mixture is browned in the fat like a pilaf, not moistened like a bread dressing.
- Any sweet herb except sageSweet herbs meant the mild kitchen herbs: thyme, marjoram, savory, parsley, though period lists were loose and sometimes took in sage itself. Excluding it here is Oscar's own stipulation.
- YieldThis makes roughly 2 1/2 cups, enough for a small bird or to fill the neck cavity of a large one. Triple it for a 14-16 lb turkey.
- If you stuff the birdStuffing packed into a raw turkey must reach 165F at its centre, which usually means the breast overcooks. Baking it in a dish alongside gives a better result, and the reserved giblet broth is there for the gravy.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book reads as a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the period actually put out. The instruction to use "any powdered sweet herb except sage" is the most telling line here: sage-heavy stuffing was the ordinary American domestic style, and refusing it aligns the dish with French practice, where a farce of chopped offal, crumbs and butter, finished with fortified wine, was often used. Calling the finished mixture a forcemeat rather than a stuffing points the same direction: farce is the French noun, the verb being farcir, from the Latin farcire. Sherry and Madeira were both long imported through the Atlantic trade.