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Chicken Stuffing
(Ripieno di pollo) The ingredients are 1/4 lb. lean veal or pork or breast of turkey and chicken giblets.
Cook this meat together with a little hash of onion, parsley, celery, carrot and butter. Season with salt pepper and spices, moistening it with broth. Take dry from the fire, take off the soft parts of the giblets, add a few dry mushrooms soft ened in water, a little slice of lean fat ham and chop everything fine. Into the sauce that has remained from the cooking throw enough breadcrumbs to make a tablespoonful of hard soaked bread. Mix it with the chopped hash, add a pinch of grated cheese and two eggs and fill the chicken with all this, sewing up the opening afterwards.
The chicken can be boiled or stewed. If boiled you will have an excellent bouillon, but pay attention when cutting the chicken to extract the stuffing in one piece in order to slice it.
A forcemeat stuffing in the Artusi manner, built from a small braise rather than from bread alone. The instructions assume you know how to break down giblets and that you will be cooking the bird whole.
- The hinge: bind it firmlyThe two eggs and the soaked bread are what let the stuffing come out "in one piece" for slicing. Mix until the mass is cohesive and pack it tightly into the cavity, or it will crumble into the broth when carved.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound is about 115 g of veal, pork or turkey breast. The recipe does not say how many giblets to use; chicken giblets usually means heart, liver and gizzard. The phrase "take off the soft parts of the giblets" is obscure in this translation, but the likely sense is to keep the tender flesh and discard gristle and any tough gizzard lining before chopping.
- That tablespoonful of breadThe phrasing is garbled in translation. The sense is: add enough breadcrumbs to the pan juices to give you roughly a tablespoon of soft, soaked bread paste, which is a binder, not a filler. Do not scale it up to a stuffing's worth of bread.
- Dried mushroomsDried porcini are the likeliest reading, though the recipe says only "a few dry mushrooms." Soak in warm water 20-30 minutes, squeeze dry and chop; the strained soaking liquid is worth adding to the braise in place of some broth.
- Prosciutto, not breakfast ham"A little slice of lean fat ham" is prosciutto crudo or a similar dry-cured Italian ham, chopped fine for seasoning.
- SpicesThe recipe does not say which. Nutmeg is the usual reading for a stuffing of this kind, sometimes with a trace of clove or cinnamon; a grating of nutmeg is the safe choice.
- DonenessStuffing inside a bird heats more slowly than the meat around it. Take it to 165F/74C at the center of the forcemeat, not just in the thigh, since it is bound with raw egg.
- Sewing and yieldClose the cavity with cotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle; skewers will let the filling escape into the poaching liquid. The quantities given are modest, enough to stuff a small chicken rather than to fill a large bird.
- Boiling means poachingA hard boil will shred the skin and cloud the bouillon the recipe is praising. Keep the water at a bare tremble, about 180-190F.
The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, drew heavily on the Italian domestic tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene of 1891 is generally credited with fixing a shared national repertoire in print at a time when Italy's regional kitchens had little in common. This ripieno belongs to that frugal tradition: it is a way of turning giblets, a scrap of veal and a slice of prosciutto into a sliceable galantine-like center for a bird that would otherwise feed too few. The instruction to poach rather than roast reflects a household economy in which one operation had to yield two dishes, the bollito and its broth, and the note about extracting the stuffing whole shows the stuffing was meant to be served as a course in its own right rather than spooned out as an afterthought.