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Truffle Stuffing for Turkey
Brush well one and one-half pounds of truffles, peel them, mince the peel very fine, cut the truffles into slices, put them all into a saucepan with one-fourth pound of minced fat bacon and any obtainable fat from the turkey, also a good-sized lump of butter, with salt and pepper to taste. Cook for ten minutes, and let it get cold before using. A turkey should be stuffed with this three days before it is cooked, and truffle sauce should accompany it. Stuffing for Boiled Turkey or Rabbit Remove the outer peel of one pound of chestnuts, then put them in boiling water until the inner skins can easily be removed, then trim them and put them into a small lined saucepan, cover them with broth and boil until the pulp and the broth has been well reduced. Pass the chestnuts through a fine wire-sieve. Chop fine one-fourth pound of cold, boiled fat bacon, and mix it with the chestnut puree; season to taste with salt, pepper and minced lemon peel. The stuffing will then be ready for use.
Stuffing for Turkey (Roasted).
To one pound of sifted breadcrumbs add one-half pound of butter, one pound of boiled and mashed potatoes, and a little marjoram and summer savory rubbed to a fine powder; add sufficient eggs to stiffen, and season with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. A little sausage-meat, grated ham, and a few oysters or chopped mushrooms, may be added; they are a marked improvement, as are also a few walnuts, roasted chestnuts and filberts, and the grated rind of half a lemon. A few cooked truffles also improve it, and some may also be served in the gravy with the bird.
Three stuffings run together in one entry. The first carries an instruction that no modern kitchen should follow; the chestnut and breadcrumb versions are workable, and the notes below separate them.
- The three-day stuffing is the problemThe truffle stuffing directs that a raw turkey be filled with cooked fat, bacon and truffles and held for three days before roasting. Stuffing packed inside a raw bird sits at the warmest, least-ventilated point of the carcass, and even under good refrigeration that is three days for Salmonella and Clostridium perfringens to multiply in a rich, low-acid, low-salt fat medium. Do not make this stuffing as written; use a current recipe if you want a truffled forcemeat.
- Why the original could say itThe instruction reflects a practice of letting truffle perfume migrate into the flesh while the bird sat in a cold larder or ice-chest, at temperatures nobody measured.
- Truffles by the poundA pound and a half of truffles is a Waldorf quantity, not a domestic one; at today's prices for fresh truffle a stuffing on this scale runs well into four figures. The minced peel folded back in is the sound idea here, and it is worth remembering whenever you pare a truffle for anything else.
- Chestnut stuffing: the peeling stepScore the flat side of each nut, then boil briefly; the inner pellicle only lifts while the chestnuts are hot, so work in small batches and keep the rest in the water. One pound in the shell yields roughly 10-12 oz of usable nut.
- "Small lined saucepan"Most likely a tin-lined copper pan. Any non-reactive pan does the same job, which is to keep the broth from taking on a metallic edge during the long reduction.
- "Cold, boiled fat bacon"Not the cured breakfast rasher. This is fatty pork belly or salt pork simmered until tender, then chopped; unsmoked pancetta or blanched salt pork is the nearest substitute. Blanch salt pork first or the stuffing will be too salty to season.
- Roasted-turkey stuffing: proportionsOne pound of crumbs, one pound of mashed potato and half a pound of butter is very rich and very dense. Two or three eggs will bind it; add them one at a time, since the potato already holds it together. The list that follows -- sausage, ham, oysters, nuts, lemon -- is a menu of options, not a single recipe.
- Cook it outside the birdBoth the chestnut and the breadcrumb mixtures bake well in a buttered dish at 350F for 35-45 minutes, browned on top. If you do stuff a bird, do it immediately before roasting and take the centre of the stuffing to 165F.
- YieldThe truffle and breadcrumb mixtures each make enough for a 12-14 lb turkey, roughly 8-10 servings as a side; the chestnut one yields appreciably less.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a hotel that fed New York's wealthiest diners, and the truffle stuffing shows the scale that implies: a pound and a half of truffles for one bird was a statement of what the house could command. Holding a truffled bird for a day or more before cooking was a familiar practice in nineteenth-century French cookery -- the truffle was said to perfume the flesh -- and it carried into hotel kitchens that had deep cold cellars and ice-rooms. The chestnut stuffing belongs to an older and more English line, chestnut and boiled bacon with lemon peel being a common partner to boiled fowl and rabbit, while the third, with its potato, breadcrumbs, marjoram and summer savory, is closer to ordinary American home cooking of the period, with the truffles offered at the end as the flourish that turned a family dish into a Waldorf one.