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Dressing for Chickens or Turkey
Mrs. F. D.
Chop bread crumbs quite fine, season well with pepper, salt, and plenty of butter; moisten with a very little water, and add a few oysters with a little of the liquor, if you please. The best authorities say the dressing is the finest when it crumbles as the fowl is cut.
A dry, crumbly bread dressing of the older American type, with oysters as an optional enrichment. There are no quantities, so it is built by feel — the note about crumbling as the fowl is carved is the real instruction.
- Working proportionsFor a 10-12 lb turkey, figure about 8 cups of fine dry bread crumbs, 3/4 to 1 cup butter, 1 to 2 teaspoons salt and a generous grinding of pepper. A 4-5 lb chicken takes roughly a third of that.
- "Chop bread crumbs quite fine"This means stale bread reduced almost to meal, not the soft torn cubes of a modern bread stuffing. The texture is closer to a buttered crumb than a bread pudding, which is what allows it to crumble rather than slice.
- Moisten with a very little waterResist the urge to add stock until it is wet. Over-moistened dressing sets into a paste in the cavity; the whole point of this style is that it falls apart on the carving board.
- Butter is the seasoningWith no egg, no onion and no herbs, flavor rests entirely on butter, salt and pepper. Use good butter and salt it more assertively than you would a mixture that also carries sausage or aromatics.
- The oystersShucked oysters with a spoonful or two of their liquor; the recipe asks only for "a few," so keep the quantity small. Fold them in whole at the last moment — they will cook through in the bird, and chopping them releases liquid that defeats the dry crumb.
- Cooking it inside the birdStuff loosely, just before roasting, and check the center of the dressing with a thermometer as well as the thigh. Current guidance is 165F in the stuffing; with oysters present that reading matters more, not less. If the bird is done before the dressing, spoon the dressing into a dish and finish it separately.
- Baked separatelyThe mixture works well in a buttered dish at 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, covered for the first half. Add a little stock in that case, since it no longer receives fat and juices from the bird.
Dry bread dressings like this one were common in nineteenth-century American households, where stale bread was a daily by-product. The oysters are the period marker: oysters were cheap in this period, shipped inland in barrels and cans along the rail lines, and they turn up in soups, patties, sauces and poultry dressings in community cookbooks of the era, including The Home Cook Book, the Chicago charity cookbook assembled from contributions by local women and sold to benefit the Home for the Friendless (first published 1874). The recipe's appeal to "the best authorities" on crumbliness suggests a period preference about texture — whether dressing should hold together when the fowl is carved or fall away in loose crumbs — a preference that has since largely swung the other way.