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Plain Bread Stuffing
3 cups soft bread crumbs 1/2 cup Mazola 1/2 tablespoon Karo, Blue Label Celery salt to 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons grated onion season Combine the ingredients in the order given and moisten with hot water to form a thick paste, if a wet dressing is desired; otherwise leave it dry.
A promotional recipe from a corn-products cookbook, written in the compressed style of its day. The ingredient list has been garbled slightly in transcription: it reads as celery salt to taste, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper and 2 tablespoons grated onion.
- MazolaRefined corn oil, still sold under the same name. Half a cup of oil to three cups of crumbs is a rich dressing by modern standards; melted butter can stand in measure for measure if you want the flavour.
- Karo, Blue LabelKaro sold corn syrup under several coloured labels, from the pale Crystal White through to the dark Red Label, with Blue Label one of the lighter grades. Light corn syrup is the closest thing on a current shelf. Half a tablespoon in three cups of crumbs is there for browning and a faint sweetness, not for sweetening.
- Soft bread crumbsNot dry crumbs from a canister. Tear day-old white bread, crusts included or not, into loose pieces about the size of a pea; three cups is roughly four to five slices. Dried crumbs will absorb far more liquid and turn to paste.
- Grated onionGrating on a box grater gives onion juice as much as onion, which is the point here since nothing is sautéed first. Two tablespoons is a small wedge off a medium onion, perhaps an eighth to a quarter of it.
- The hot waterAdd it a tablespoon at a time. The recipe offers a choice between a moist paste and a dry crumb dressing; the wet version wants the crumbs damp and clumping, not soupy, since the bird's juices will add more.
- Cooking itThe recipe assumes the stuffing goes inside the bird. Stuffing packed into a cavity has to reach 165F at its centre, which usually means overcooking the breast; baking it in a covered dish for 30-40 minutes at 350F, uncovered for the last 10, is the common modern practice.
- YieldThree cups of crumbs makes enough for a 4-5 lb roasting chicken, or a modest side dish for four. Triple it for a 12-14 lb turkey.
This looks to come from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company to sell Mazola oil and Karo syrup — an inference from the two brand names, but a plausible one, and it would explain why both appear in a stuffing that has no real need of either. Plain bread dressings of the period were normally bound with butter or suet and moistened with stock. Corn oil was a comparative novelty in American home kitchens in the early twentieth century, a by-product of wet corn milling that manufacturers worked hard to establish as an all-purpose cooking fat, and free pamphlets putting it into every course of dinner were the standard method. The dry-or-wet instruction at the end leaves the choice to the cook: some want stuffing that packs and slices, others want it loose and crumbling.