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Dressing for Turkey
C. Kennicot.
One pint of soaked bread, two tablespoons of sage, two tablespoons of summer savory, two teaspoons of salt, two teaspoons pepper, butter size of an egg
A contributor's ingredient list rather than a method, in the shorthand common to subscription cookbooks: the assumption is that the cook already knows to soak stale bread, squeeze it out, and work everything together with the hands. A few of the quantities need translating, and two of them need restraint.
- A pint of soaked breadMeasure the bread after soaking and squeezing, not before: about two cups of damp crumb, which comes from roughly 6 to 8 ounces of stale bread. That yields enough dressing for a chicken or a very small turkey, so triple it for a 12 to 14 lb bird.
- Butter the size of an eggA common nineteenth-century measure, generally reckoned at about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and work it through the soaked bread.
- The herbs are the hingeTwo tablespoons each of sage and summer savory reads as dried herb, and at that rate the dressing will be aggressively medicinal by modern palates. Start with a teaspoon or two of each and taste the mixture before committing.
- Salt and pepperTwo teaspoons of pepper in a pint of bread is a great deal of heat. Halve both seasonings and adjust to taste.
- What is missingNo egg, no onion, no stock. The soaked bread is the only binder, so the result is soft and loose rather than sliceable. An egg and a chopped onion sweated in the butter are period-appropriate additions if you want it to hold together.
- Cooking itDressing packed into a bird must reach 165F at the center, which usually means overcooking the breast. Baking it in a covered dish for 30 to 40 minutes at 350F, uncovered for the last ten, gives a better result and a safer one.
Bread dressing seasoned with sage is the standard American treatment for poultry through much of the nineteenth century, and summer savory was a familiar partner to it in period cookery. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women and sold for charitable benefit, which explains the form of this entry: it carries a contributor's name, C. Kennicot, and it lists what was used without explaining what was done, because the intended reader had made dressing many times and only wanted to know someone else's proportions. Recipe books of this kind are less instruction manuals than a record of how a particular circle of households actually cooked.